The Minor in Writing Gateway Course moves quickly. Just as I was getting ready to celebrate the completion of my re-purposing project - "Ball Is Not Life" - I began thinking about the remediation project. The assignment asked us to take our re-purposed piece and make the same argument to the same audience, but through a different medium. I had to turn "Ball Is Not Life" the article into "Ball Is Not Life" the...something else. 

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There were so many different possibilities to explore for the remediation. I thought about doing a podcast because I'd listened to sports podcasts in the past and because podcasts are, in general, very trendy. I also thought about putting together a short documentary about my experience with the Michigan Basketball program -- sort of like an E:60 segment. But alas, I didn't have the resources for an E:60 segment and I never got excited about the idea of a podcast.

 

I knew that I wanted to speak, but I also wanted to include some visual aspect. A lecture sounded boring, but a TED Talk -- now that sounded interesting. TED Talks are inspiring, provocative, and entertaining. They make audiences laugh and learn at the same time. Entertainment and impact is what I wanted to shoot for in my remediation, so a TED Talk seemed like a great platform.

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I spent some time on YouTube watching different TED Talk speakers and noting the different topics that they discussed. My favorite one was called "Be A Man" by Joe Ehrmann, who discussed the overly-masculine culture of youth sports and how it impacts young boys' notions of what it means to be a man. Although I had a different subject matter, I also wanted to discuss the implications of sports culture on our overall society. My topic seemed intellectual enough and I believed that my story was interesting enough to hold the audience's attention. So, I began the process of composing my own "TED Talk."