Colin Rhinesmith

This afternoon, I had the opportunity to lead a workshop with my fellow Boston Action Tank colleagues Marie Celestin and Felicia Sullivan at the Be The Media! Mini-Conference. The title of our workshop was “Strategies for Shaping our Media Future: Envisioning Change with the Boston Action Tank”. Here’s the description from the website:

The media/communications environment is rapidly changing. Who will control the networks and tools that we use? How can we work pro-actively for media & technology systems to better serve our communities? We will talk about the types of policies, technologies and economics that can create a better media future, and how to win and protect what we need and want. This workshop will use strategy mapping tools in small groups, and is designed for 10-25 people. We hope to learn from you, and to share some tools to help you position your current work in a long-term strategic framework.

During the workshop, we had a terrific group of passionate, committed communications workers located in area non-profits who helped us envision what they’d like to see as their ideal future media system in an age of networked communication.

The topic of social media literacy played a large role in the discussion. Most participants felt that there should be places where community members in physical places can go to gain access to and learn more about networked technologies and their impact on our everyday lives. In addition, most believed that Community Media & Technology Centers are key within this future.

Not surprisingly, I was excited by the response and energized to see the enthusiasm from the group about how community media/technology centers can play a role in this work.

The need for social media literacy is becoming a common thread through my interactions with community members at CCTV and in the discussions I’ve been apart of and read online. I do believe that community media/technology centers can in fact fill that void where people are feeling the need to share physical space with others around their online media use.

At the end of the workshop, the group agreed that they would like to be a apart of future discussions, with previous workshop participants, to expand our conversation today about how to create a shared community-vision for our media future.

I would like to thank the conference organizers for allowing us to be apart of this conversation.

Civic Engagement, Community Media, Community Technology, Conference, Media Justice, Media Literacy, Media Policy, Public Access TV, Public Media

(This is a cross-post - with a different title - from here)

A few weeks ago, I spoke with Jared M. Gordon from NewEnglandFilm.com. He was doing a piece about the Flip Mino cameras and contacted me to learn more about how we’re using them here at CCTV.

The article, entitled “Three Filmmakers, Three Cameras” is now online at their website. Here’s a bit from the article:

“What projects are you currently putting together?

During this year I’ve been the project manager of what we call Bridging the Digital Divide. We’re putting computers and Internet access into the hands of people who need it the most in Cambridge. Another project, the Neighbor Media Program, is a citizen journalism program (neighbormedia.org) in which ordinary community folks are reporting on local news. A lot of what will be involved segues into the Flip Mino…

Tell me about your experience with your current camera of choice. What sort of work have you done with it?

We’ll be distributing [Flip Minos] to neighbor media journalists on a monthly basis. They’ll take them out, hopefully use it to cover stories, and we provide support, training, and all kinds of production skills that can help augment their stories. Some journalists weren’t ready for the advanced cameras and they wanted an easier way to start involving themselves in media production. We bought the Flips for that purpose, then realized that we could use them for our summer institute (youth program).

I have spent enough time to get to know some of its quirks, what it’s good for and what it’s not good for. For the money and for what it is, it’s absolutely worth it. It’s a cool little camera.”

Read more at NewEnglandFilm.com.

Cambridge Community Television, Community Media, Community Technology, PEGTV, Public Access TV, Video

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

Over the past few months, I’ve been trying to figure out how to get this site jump started again. Since a lot of what I’m writing about these days is about community media and technology, it made sense to use my CCTV blog and thesis blog to do that. But, in doing that I found myself spread across too many sites.

So to make it easier on myself, I’ve decided to leave Community Media in Transition aside for now and get back to using this site to write about community media and technology, and hopefully more music-related, stuff moving forward.

That’s my decision and I’m sticking to it.

Community Media, Community Technology, Independent Music