Life in A Day, Day in a Life, or One Day on Earth

I recently heard about the “Life in a Day” project through Google and YouTube where people, on July 24th this year, can videotape their “normal day” and submit it – with the plan that they may turn it into a movie. As I researched this it looked like their goal was to turn it into a movie for the Sundance Film Festival for 2011. I thought, what a great idea! As a school teacher, we have worked on similar type projects over the years, on a much smaller scale.

The project made me think about the different, and similar, experiences people have all over the world. A few years ago I was in a role as the International Connections Resource Teacher at a best – practices private school, Independent Day School (http://www.idsyes.com/). One of the projects I headed up was working through an organization called iEARN (http://www.iearn.org/), where students from around the world worked on collaborative projects with each other. The project our school represented was “A Day in the Life” of students from around the world. Each class (about five to seven classes from several different countries) submitted projects sharing what their typical day was like (http://iearn.org/circles/2007session1/projects/studentDayInTheLife.pdf ). Another project we did was “Cartoon Characters Travel Your City”. Both projects taught the students about people in different schools and different cultures (http://iearn.org/circles/2009session1/projects/citiesOfTheWorld.ppt).

I was very excited to read about this new project, Life in A Day (http://www.youtube.com/lifeinaday) until I learned that there was another organization with that idea (http://www.onedayonearth.org/) that had already shared this idea on youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3Nj72EZZvs) and had advertised that 10-10-10 would be the day that everyone should capture their life on video.

I am excited to see a project where people will submit videos to share their lives with one another. At first, I was deeply disappointed that it appeared that one idea was taken from someone who had already come up with this idea. We try to teach our children honesty and giving credit to resources when you get ideas from others, especially in the age of so much readily available information on the internet. Then I thought about marketing and brick and mortar businesses such as CVS and Walgreen's or McDonald's and Burger King. Many times you will see these businesses right across from each other. They benefit from each other's marketing. They provide competition which helps keep products in line for the consumer.

Maybe it will be interesting to see how different each movie becomes. Either way, I believe the more we understand others, who may on the surface be different than we are, we learn how much we truly have in common with each other.