For those of you at this year's Terry talks, you'll obviously be aware of our little YouTube experiment. In any event, I present to you the fruit of that labour below.
If you weren't at the conference, here is the gist: audience members were ask to participate by brainstorming, pitching, choosing, and then executing an activity amenable to recording via YouTube. This was done during the odd free 5 minutes here and there in the conference program. In total I think about 20 minutes in all was used to get the material for the video.
Big thank you to the all involved, and related to this (and if you are a UBC student), be aware that we are now formally taking applications for the next Terry talks (v.2009), which will be held in late September (possibly early October).
Also, for those that like archiving generally, here is the original Terry talk note (i.e. the pitch from hundred that we recieved that day) that led to the idea - not sure who was the owner of the card, but if it's you, do let us know.
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The interesting thing I observed is how lossy and imperfect the meme transfer is. It seemed like each "idea" began as a fairly coherent gesture, but by the time it spread to the whole room it was just minimally constrained flailing about. Given the inherent differences between individuals' ability to mimic dance movements, I suspect that in some cases physically gifted people were perfectly mimicking an imperfectly learned move from more awkward people, rather than linear degeneration across the board.
It would be interesting to repeat to repeat this over several days with different "populations," in which one of the last people to learn the new dance move demonstrates it to the next population. It'd be interesting to see how long it is before a given move evolves into a fairly stable form (i.e., one almost everybody could perfectly mimic).
HP, that reminds me a LOT of the game "Telephone". According to Wikipedia,
"As well as providing amusement, the game can have educational value. It shows how easily information can become corrupted by indirect communication. The game has been used in schools to simulate the spread of gossip and supposed harmful effects."