Doing It For the KIDS!

First Shot - So this Monday will be my first day doing the bit that urgently matters in a minute-to-minute sort of way: working in one of our after school programs. At the moment we're short of solid information but it looks like my co-worker (also a CTC VISTA) and I will be playing zone with 25 high school freshmen and somewhere between 0-5 video cameras in an effort to provide an interesting hands-on introduction to media production and digital storytelling. We're attempting to do this by breaking things up into small groups with very specific aims (mini-missions) and augmenting the equipment with whatever we can scare up. That means my beloved drum machine, an old digicam, my microphone and Google. I'm glad we didn't have to resort to building birdhouses out of popsicle sticks.The process of tracking down the means of production (cameras, software, staff we're meant to be working with, potential volunteers) have actually made me start to understand what Donald Rumsfeld was talking about with all that "known unknowns" jive... see below, coaxed into poetic format courtesy of Slate (http://www.slate.com/id/2081042/): The UnknownAs we know, There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know There are known unknowns. That is to say We know there are some things We do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, The ones we don't know We don't know.—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefingIf it survives the battlefield, I'll post the notes, general curriculum and lesson plans that I whipped up for the program. Keep your eyes clear, keep your hands steady and most importantly, keep your receipts.

Comment from danielle martin on October 2, 2006 - 11:09am

Could you sign out cameras from BNN?

Also, I was meeting with some guys from ACME Boston last night who are trying to do video blogging workshops with folks with no equipment, and we found some resources on the Current.tv site...click on the "Film/Video Resources Near You" link on the bottom (damn Flash menus mean no permalinks to content!). I haven't contacted these folks yet (Project Thnk Different is listed, but I don't think they have any equipment) but it might help.

Oh and I saw this guy speak yesterday, John Herman, at the Boston Media Makers meeting, who is a media literacy teacher up in NH. He said he pitched the idea of doing a student run multimedia newspaper to somebody from Vonage and they sent him cameras and equipment. I'm hoping to go visit his class sometime soon.

-Danielle