Digital Arts Service Corps - workshops

More Workshops, Instructors, & Blogs

Chris Anderson — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 00:05:22 +0000

Marketing
January 2011 is the first month of my redesign of our workshop brochure. The original lacked our image of who we are- a MEDIA ARTS center. It looked more like a school lunch calendar, or a hospital manual. I added images, descriptions, and tried to make it easy to look at. Please!! Any input is appreciate on what works and what doesn't with this design.
This is my first attempt with Adobe InDesign. It's a great program for designing print material, and has plenty of add-on scripts users can share with one another. I would like to have a template designed so that you can just drop in new images, and paste new descriptions for each workshop without knowing anything about graphic design. The time and skills needed for the task will be cut tremendously.

Meetup.com helps incredibly with organizing events.
Most of our ShareSD jammers have found us through meetup.com

Volunteer Recruitment
Our members and visitors are growing. We've had visits from high school and university classes, independent artists, and local residents attending events and workshops. Thankfully, we are receiving more interns, donations, and volunteer instructors to help with all the new attention.
One goal is to have a migration of our curriculum onto a web-based system. Our server is slow, old, and has duplicates of everything running around all over the place. Google docs is my current stomping grounds for keeping new curriculum and managing new and potential volunteers to teach workshops.
I just created a Google Form so potential instructors can submit their workshop proposals to us. It clearly defines their goals and outcomes, while creating a contact database of those interested in volunteering. The form is a spreadsheet in disguise, so this information can be visualized, redirected, and published in several ways. Here is a copy of the form I've created: Proposal Form And here is how I want the information presented and archived (on its own): Doc View.

Tracking our Technology
As we approach closer to our annual 10 day film festival, the need for a reliable and organized system to track our equipment grows. We have seven screenings that happen simultaneously, and it all happens outside our walls. I discovered a Drupal program called MERCI(Manage Equipment Reservations, Checkout and Inventory), it can extend any content type into a list of unique reservable items (like studios) or buckets of interchangeable items (like DV cameras)." Developed by Chad Phillips for Open Media Project. (Thanks to Gavin for directing me to MERCI contacts!) This has everything I've been looking for, BUT...

1. Do I have the time to learn Drupal and fix any bugs before I leave?
2. Will anyone have the ability to maintain/update MERCI once I leave?

Before I step into uncharted territory, I'm going to see if I can Excel my way through this assignment. I recently took advantage of my IST and had a six-hour excel training, which gave me a few tricks to try out.

CMS
We have Kintera. And I do not like it. I had to call tech support. Their solution to my problem was that I had to be on Internet Explorer, clear my cookies, and restart IE in order for my duplicate contacts to update. Not exactly good workflow, especially when you are working in a Mac lab. I'd like to hear your thoughts on Kintera. Email me if you have any!

A growing community: http://macsddiy.posterous.com

Last month's Videographer's Lounge,a free gathering, was hosted by video artist Ilan Katin. This is a video mapping demo. Photo by Miguel Vega: portfolio.accent.tv/

Flash drive fun!

Jessica McCoy — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 21:31:40 +0000

Hello everyone! Time for an update. I've been way way busy lately (I'm sure you all know how that feels). We just finished a weeklong workshop with middle schoolers at the Marin Youth Center's Computer Clubhouse. It was my first time in a computer clubhouse, they seem like a great idea! While I was there I learned a little about making beats using FruityLoops. Fun! But a lot harder than I thought it would be.

Right now the main things on my plate are working with Danielle and others on Stories for Change, a web portal for community-based digital storytelling facilitators. Danielle is head of the committee that's creating the site and I'm helping with content collection. We're getting close to launch so I've been extra busy gathering up resource materials, formatting them, and uploading to the site. It's a Drupal-based site so luckily the uploading is relatively simple. (someone else built the site, someone far techier than I am!)

Anyway it's been really eye-opening to see all the work that goes into planning a website. The site should be really great resource for anyone interested in using digital storytelling in their community work. I'll keep you posted on when we launch.

Other news:

--Fellow VISTAs Naomi Jimenez and Brittney Fosbrook came to CDS to do a digital storytelling workshop a few weeks ago. Yay! Hopefully they will post their stories on Blip.tv to share them. It was good to have a little VISTA reunion...I hope we can collaborate further on digital storytelling work with their organizations.

--I finally got an external hard drive to hold all my work! Thanks goodness. I've been having a lot of issues staying organized because there hasn't been one computer where I can work all the time. I'd been daydreaming about this portable drive from LaCie and voila! CDS came though and now I've got it in my hot little hands.

--Speaking of hard drives and such, we also just got two new flash drives to use in our workshops. They are super handy, especially since we often need to transfer files from machine to machine, Mac to PC, etc. We found these 2 gb flash drives for just $20, can't complain about that. What we do complain about is the way our flash drives tend to grow legs and walk away from our workshops. This time we've attached smurf keychains to the drives, we'll see if it makes them a little trickier to just stuff into your pocket. I ran across these other ideas for how to make USB flash drive modifications, seems like good clean CTC VISTA fun and an anti-theft measure, too. Maybe I can make one out of the VISTA robot?

Snow!!!

Raymond Varona — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 18:58:49 +0000

It's painfully obvious that I grew up in the south when I get excited over 1/2" of snow (mind yer snickering, Boston-folk), but I should also add that our lab closes when schools close. That means I have at least one day of peace and quiet. Ahhhhh.... Well, apart from the racket caused by the construction next door anyway.

Life at C4K is chugging along nicely. Our recruiting has been up and down (12 last month, but only 4 this month), but the ups seem to have been enough as the lab feels more full than when the year first started. Workshop attendance is still relatively low (3-4 on average), but those that do go seem to enjoy it. I've also started gravitating towards guided activities versus class settings. The more successful workshops have been things like making popup cards, CD art, posters, etc. I've been trying workshops that lead into the tougher topics like digital video and audio with things like dubbing and digital storytelling, but we're still having a tough time getting kids to try them.

One of the neater programs thats starting up is a web development project led by a web design firm. They've offered to volunteer their time and expertise to train a select group of kids to rebuild a website by offering weekly workshops, but it'd be mostly up to the kids to design the site and figure out what they'd like to do. I'm guessing it'll take some gentle prodding to get them going, but we have some really good kids that are attending so I think this particular program has a good chance at doing well.

My random side project for this month is looking into revamping our inventory system. What normally happens is that after all the information is logged into the database, we put a numbered yellow sticker on the components. However, this tends not to work so well for tracking and logging, so I'm looking into rigging up a cheap barcoding system. I picked up some of those cheapie Cue Cat barcode scanners ('fixed' with CatNip) for use as the input and a free barcode font to create stickers for output. Works pretty well so far, except now comes the hard part of coding an Access form in VBA to automate the procedures. Blech. Code.

Looks like we've got a bunch of cool new VISTAs, welcome everyone and best of luck to you in your year of service!