Secret universe?

Julie Adler — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 19:11:33 +0000

It is Friday afternoon, and I am about to conclude my first *official* week as a CTC*VISTA at Cambridge Community Television. To sum it up: I feel like I have been given the key to a secret door that leads to the land of 21st-century innovation.

I don't mean that in a dorky way...really. (Judging by the listserv emails, I'm quite the airhead compared to all you techies.) I just feel this is giving me a huge leg up over everyone else I graduated with 2 months ago. Ironically enough, I found out about CTC*VISTA through a job/internship opportunity newsletter of BU's College of Communication. It's ironic because I had never heard about CCTV at BU, even though it's located less than a mile away from the BU Bridge, offers full access to equipment, much more freedom to create content (as well as a larger viewership base than BUTV has), and classes that are simple to get into and teach you things like podcasting and HTML (while my multimedia class last semester merely taught me Microsoft FrontPage). I did hear about WGBH quite often, and it was through my internship there that I first heard about CCTV. The reason I am recalling this stuff is to emphasize what a turn of luck it was that brought me here. Ever since Penguin Day I've been realizing more and more what a necessary component this VISTAship is in completing my media education in today's world. (And I'm getting like $11,000 for it!)

I just read Meegan's comment about the Knight Foundation news challenge. I looked through the winners and saw organizations like Harvard and MIT...both involved in groundbreaking digital media projects, and both located around the corner from my host organization. Lisa Williams, founder of placeblogger.com and h2otown, resides in the neighboring community of Watertown and my supervisor just told me to set up a meeting with her. Not to be profane but...WTF!? This entire experience is blowing my mind right now. I'm going to have a blog on CCTV's website and I'm currently working on a new program (worthy of being crowned by the Knight foundation, I'd say) to place citizen journalists around the city and use all of CCTV's awesome resources to become the glue that holds these communities together. When the school year begins, I'm also going to be working in a state-of-the-art media studio (which I got to see the other day and it totally blows BU's facilities out of the water) to create new youth media programs for the educational access channels. I didn't even know what PEG access was a month ago...or open-source software, for that matter.

And the icing on the cake would be that the people here are all really great, and I get to interact with some really diverse members of the community.... and on days like yesterday, I even get to experience surprise visits from Sir Ben Sheldon himself!

Dropping off the face of the vista-planet

Julie Bohnlein — Mon, 14 May 2007 04:45:41 +0000

It's recently come to my attention that I have disappeared from the face of the vista planet. So I have a small update.

Since March, this is what I have been doing at BNN:

- Taking inventory on new equipment

- Going and presenting our summer teen program at summer opprotunities fairs

- Learning how to use the new equipment

- Editing a BNN program called "Early Works" which is a compliation show of footage from recently trained producers

- Helping set up logistics for our summer program (how many teens, how many groups, how many supervisors)

- Mailing out applications

- Recieving applications back

- Setting up and updating spreadsheets on everyone we sent applications to and ones we've recieved back

- Updating BNN's Community Bulletin Board

- Helping with various mailouts BNN has because I'm apparently a mailout-machiiiiiiine.

Instead of being at the Multimedia center in Roxbury everyday, I'm now there four days a week, and spend one day a week at the cityplace location, mainly for updating the community bulletin board and collecting applications.

Digital Arts Service Corps - peg access

Secret universe?

Dropping off the face of the vista-planet