The genre of “edutainment” presents videos roughly equivalent to non-fiction best-sellers or college textbooks. Transformational Education Initiatives provides a conduit for the delivery of its documentaries to schoolrooms and adult education classes.
Audio-visuals convey information much more effectively than textbooks or instructor lectures. Augmented by selected easy-reading materials using contemporary graphics, videobooks can enhance the transmission of academic data.
Programs from David Lionel’s World Citizen Videobooks series deliver the principal seminar information. Presenters can play entertaining short versions or selected segments from the full-length DVDs. All the shows have convenient dividers where discussion guides can stop the playback to invite responses from the study group.
Audience members come to know each other through sharing their insights and reactions in dyads and foursomes keyed to the video presentations. Leaders conduct interactivating participatory exercises to bring the issues to people in a personal way. These group exchanges build fellow feeling. Screenings become occasions for community building.
In the Catskill mountains, a public-private partnership could restore the railbed along the Ashokan reservoir. Citizens working together can bring this locomotive for local prosperity back on line.
The spectacular views along the Ashokan reservoir in the Catskills are only accessible by rail. Restoring an operational tourist train system there will mark out a regional identity. Returning to yesteryear and projecting into the future, let us envision this ghost railroad running again.
