"building the capacity of public media and technology organizations"
Check out my appearance on a panel about changing the media on Cambridge's cable access station, CCTV Critical Focus
This is an article written by Reebee Garofalo. He's a professor who teaches about music and social movements at UMass.
Copyright: Its Still About the Content, Stupid.
By Reebee Garofalo
Original article can be found at: http://acmboston.org/node/340
Just a note that we have our fourth CTC VISTA Digital Media group call on Friday December 12th at 2pm EST. (Email Danielle for the call in #s.)
In an effort to make the calls more useful, we're going to focus on a topic and keep the individual updates to the first 15 minutes. So any other CTC VISTAs that are interested in participating in a Video Distribution discussion, please call in!
Are you ready? I'm leading my first web conference presentation tomorrow afternoon to spread my digital storytelling love on the Neighborhood Networks Quarterly Consortia Conference Call. I met some of these folks back in June at the Digital Storytelling Bootcamp at the (HUD) Neighborhood Networks Regional Technical Assistance Workshops. Check out the Powerpoint if you like.
I was having a conversation with an intellectual recently. He was debating whether or not he should take time off to do community service or go straight to graduate school. He noted dispassionately, “In two hundred years, we’ll all be dead anyway.”
His idea seems to be that we are in some kind of rat race to achieve our goals and make something of our lives. This idea only makes sense, though, if those achievements will be completely permanent, and I don’t believe they can be. Even if you produce a great work of literature that continues to be read hundreds of years from now, eventually the solar system will cool or the universe will wind down or collapse and all trace of your efforts will vanish. And in any case, we can’t hope for even a fraction of this sort of immortality. What my friend doesn’t understand is that change is personal, and if there is any point at all to what we do, we have to find it within our own lives. This is the reason I joined up, as did so many others, to serve as an AmeriCorps VISTA.
[From the blog of Raymond Varona, August 23, 2006.]
During the summer, most of our population was made up of kids whose primary language wasn't English and who had never used a computer before. As a result, the workshops were more like guided activities instead of real skill-building sessions since I have to literally show them, step-by-step, how to do every action (including opening files and browsing through folders). So I started off with an intro to Photoshop and gradually worked my content down to the point where my last workshop was on how to change fonts in different programs...
[From the blog of Danielle Martin, 10/13/2006]
Morgan Sully, developed an open DIY Digital Media Toolkit/CD-ROM, with a simple HTML start page and links to resources and free software (usually distributed on CD) to bring to sessions he did in his work with The San Diego Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Transgender Community Center.
Participatory culture is about the intersection of digital media tools and the ongoing transition of the World Wide Web from a collection of websites to a full-fledged computing platform serving a variety of web-based applications to people. I use the term “participatory culture” to reference the concept of active participation or the act of sharing in the creation of ideas, versus the “passive” scenario where people can receive information but are not allowed to engage in the creation or selection. Participation also refers to the availability of sources and individuals’ ability to customize their media experience.
So far, digital distribution (or digital delivery) discussions among CTC VISTAs have been focused on video sharing, mostly among cable access stations (such as the NYMAP or Digital Bicycle projects). With the explosion of video sharing sites such as YouTube, Google Video, and Blip.tv, the ability to share video content has become almost second-hand to young web users. Factor in the ease of peer-to-peer network technology and we have an environment where youth could certainly be sharing all sorts of their own digital content.
Comment from danielle martin on December 15, 2006 - 4:04pm
As a little experiment, I'm going to post the notes as a comment here (12/15/06):
Attendees: Danielle, Jess, Gariet, Ray, Lashanda and guest: Andrew from MNN
Video Distribution Discussion
1. Compression
2. Andrew - guest speaker from MNN Youth Channel
More links to video resources at http://del.icio.us/CTCVISTA/video.
Next call topic - Youth Development....why teach youth how to make media? (January 19th? during next PSO)