Common Craft Blog
Coming Soon: More Videos on Financial Responsibility
By leelefever on July 20, 2009 - 8:54am
Here's a question for you: Were you taught about financial responsibility when you were young? 
When I ask this question, the vast majority of people respond with a quick "nope." I sure wasn't. In my high school I learned to recite a poem from BeoWulf in Olde English, but never learned about 401ks or compound interest. In light of the current financial crisis, we want to do our part to make sure people understand the important elements of personal finance and being financially responsible.
The First Three
This is why we've focused the first part of this year on videos about financial basics. We started with very basic videos, meant to be prerequisites for more complex topics. We've covered Saving Money (including Compound Interest), Borrowing Money and Investing Money. With these in place, we're ready to release our next three in the series. I won't divulge the titles just yet, but they're all meant to help people understand how to be more financially responsible.
Finance is Boring - But Doesn't Have to Be.
We see two big problems in learning about managing money. First, our financial system is filled with complex terms. It's difficult to care about financial information when you don't recognize the words. Second, most materials about finance are deadly boring. For these next Money videos, we've put a lot of effort into making the videos easy to understand, but also entertaining and fun. You won't find finance videos like these anywhere else.
For Whom?
We often have specific people in mind when working on videos like these. There are usually two audiences:
1. Learners - These are the people who need to learn about financial responsibility. They are students in classrooms and seminars, they are website visitors and employees.
2. Educators - These are the people who need better ways to educate others. Our goal is to provide these good people with accurate, useful and engaging videos that will help learners grasp and even care about financial responsibility. This is the audience we expect to license the videos.
Expect the first of the videos within a week from now. We'll look forward to your feedback and ideas...
Financial responsibility (for all)
I hope that you get around to preparing something about financial fairness for financial businesses. These businesses and their customers need your help.
For example, you could encourage these businesses to use less complexity and much less fine print. There is little excuse for this.
In my own case, I usually opt out of dealing with anyone using fine print. But I don't know if you would dare make this suggestion to the financial beginners that you are training to be "financially responsible"...
Here's a question for you:
Were you taught about social responsibility when you were young?
I consider this question way more important. You'd better teach things like that.
Finance
Hip hip hurray. I am very excited to hear of the upcoming videos! As a high school finance teacher, please include something on credit cards. They have no concept of how THAT works. PS...did you know that I had one student who thought that if she needed money, she could just go to the ATM and get some. Now wouldn't that be nice. Keep up the good work.
Financial Videos? Oh no!
HI there Lee and Sachi
I love the work you guys do and have great respect for the fact that you put so much out under a CC licence for others to benefit from.
**However** as you guys seem to be the type of folk that would appreciate user/viewer feedback, here's mine:
I got into the whole Common Creaft show not long after your RSS video came out. I LOVE the way that your simple and clear (and slightly zany) explanations make complex stuff more understandable.
However, I'm really not at all interested in the financial stuff though. It's of no relevance to my work, to be honest I know the subjects you cover already and generally speaking don't come to the CC folk for financial info ( I go to Neals Blythe from the BBC for that.) Sure, you might say, "Well Seth, just don't watch those videos" and yes, I could just tune out. But up till now I've really enjoyed *all* the content you've put out; your insightful blog posts on running an internet-based business, your great vids, all of it. The other day though, I found myself thinking "Should I drop The COmmon Craft Show from my iGoogle Page and just stick it in with my RSSfeed." I decided not to, but that's really saying somthing. None of my colleagues, who are much more closely involved in my sector, educational technology, get a place on my iGoogle page, but Common Craft do. That's 'cos I love your work, guys!
So, IMHO you ought to stick to your core area of real skill (i.e. making the unexplainable bits of technology comprehensible.) With respect, leave the financial stuff to folk who can *really* get to the bare bones of this crazy global slump.
Just my 2c. Thanks for ALL the work you've done.
Seth.
Financial vs Tech Videos
Thanks for the thoughtful comment Seth - I'm happy we get a place on your page, for now. I can totally see where you're coming from and we expect others to feel the same. Technology will always be a big part of what we do and we are by no means moving away from technology.
I think it's important to think about Common Craft as a business and not a "show" as once were. As a business, we are motivated to focus on videos that are attractive to educators inside and outside of technology. In the case of the Insurance video, our goal is to give teachers an easy way to teach financial basics because this creates demand from customers who will license our work in the future. Of course, this means that some of our videos may not be as interesting to our current, more tech oriented fans. It's a risk we're willing to take to ensure that our company is successful and relevant 5 years from now. We want to create a library with a variety of subjects, some techy, some not.
We'll be back on tech before you know it, hang in there! :)
Branching out
Hey guys
I think this topic is very worthwhile pursuing, especially at the moment.
Any time you branch out a certain percentage of people are going to be thrilled and a certain percentage of devotees are going to be pissed off.
Hey ho - gotta be your decision.
Feels like this is fulfilling more of your 'deeper' educational mission?