Mixtape Monday: October

What makes it into your mixtapes? If this is a concept that’s foreign to you, what I mean is, what’s on your playlist?

In the past, committing something to a mixtape was a process that was done with great consideration and thoughtfulness, because skipping through tracks was problematic and you had to listen to the whole thing as you created the tape. When the CD came along, the process was far easier, but you still had be careful about which tracks you were going to fit into your precious 80 minutes of recording space. Now in the age of the playlist, things are much simpler and you can chop and change as you like, which is great, but it also means we’re not spending as much time deciding on the content, because if we make a bad choice, one simple click and it’s gone.

I’d like to try to amalgamate these concepts into the playlist I’m going to introduce today: each choice is carefully thought through and has been watched from beginning to end before making it onto the list; I’m only going to choose five items for the playlist and I plan to update this list fairly regularly with fresh and interesting stuff.

So, without any further ado:

1. Ken Robinson: Changing Education Paradigms. A slightly simplified version of his amazing and ground-breaking TED Talk, this video talks about what’s wrong with education and why we’ve got to work on changing it. You’ve almost certainly heard this before, but it’s worth a refresher. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

2. Alan Watts: What if Money Didn’t Matter. Again, something that I think has done the rounds fairly extensively, but nevertheless, this is a powerful message to wake up to nonsensical cyclical existence. Speaks for itself really: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd1IkirWmDo

3. David Foster Wallace: This is Water. This talks about shifting perspective towards seeing things that are there, but which we didn’t realise before. I show this to my classes and it stirs up a lot of debate. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKYJVV7HuZw

4. 30 Things You No Longer Need Because of Smartphones. Short and to the point, this video shows just how far things have progressed. Where will the next five years take us? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCowytZ0qV4

5. Linchfield Primary School: We Are the Young. If you want a feel good song for the day that’s guaranteed to get buried in your head, this is it. This is what you get when you take the time to let kids shine. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xFi0k5BBIM

Please feel free to comment or tweet me with your playlists or recommendations. I love discovering more.

Till tomorrow…