One of the best things about my job is being able to teach courses like Blogging 101 and Videoblogging Production to people in the community.
In my Blogging 101 course, I spend time a good deal of time talking about RSS, including how to subscribe to feeds, how to make it easier for your readers to subscribe to your blog’s feed and the significance of tagging.
I also talk about why Creative Commons matters.
During the second session of Blogging 101, students set up their own blogs on CCTV’s website and also get a chance to start their own free blog at Wordpress.com.
I also talk a bit about podcasting, photo blogging and other ways for students to share their media through social network sites, such as Facebook and MySpace. It’s a great introduction to Web 2.0 and Social Media.
Two weeks ago, I started teaching our new Videoblogging Production at CCTV. The course is three-sessions and tomorrow night is our final class. We started off the course talking about a number of topics included in my Blogging 101 class. We also dove right into watching and critiquing other video blogs.
The class is also a great opportunity to put aside the more technical video production stuff that we teach in our field production classes and focus on storytelling with less fancy equipment.
I think students are having a really good time with the Flip Mino cameras. By using a point and shoot video camera they’re able to focus more on how to tell a story in 3 minutes or less. I think this approach really encourages them to think about the focus of their video and how to make it locally-focused and relevant to others in the community.
At the end of the course, students will submit their videos both to their CCTV blogs and for a new series I’m producing for our public access channels, entitled “Cambridge Stories.” This is exciting for me because CCTV producers often create video for our channels and use the web to distribute their video online afterwards. Videoblogging Production flips it around. It starts with video blogs submitted by students for the course that ends up on our channels.
This approach also gaurantees both a local (public access channels) and global (video blogs online) audience for students work in their course. The course also encourages our members to use our public access computer lab to not only gain basic computer skills, but also media production skills in the process.
I’m looking forward to our final class tomorrow night and working on the post-production for the “Cambridge Stories” premiere on our channels.
The video above is something I shot while I was out over this weekend. I did it as an opportunity to learn more about my Flip Mino and compressing its video for the web. I also figured if my students had to do the work, I might as well join the fun.
Community Media, Community Technology, Public Access TV, Video Blog
