Digital Arts Service Corps - blogging

Spring Forward :)

Claudia Escobar — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 19:50:06 +0000

Where to begin? Well I am much better since my last field report. I have come to peace with my work and have come to accept that I just need to take it one step at a time without pressuring myself all the time. It has worked so far. :)

Currently I am still working with the Club Leaders, making new weekly lessons for the after school programs. We are also partnering with our local rape crisis center and they are giving us a free training on how to deal with difficult situations like risky behavior and dangerous situations. Since we deal with girls we face a lot of these challenges. The girls so far have learned how to make their own audio production and are moving into film making activities. They are going to create a talk show, a telenovela (Mexican soap opera) and a parody on American Next Top Model. That should be fun!

During Spring Break we had a spring break camp for teen girls in where they came in and had hands on activities using photography, radio production and filmmaking. They wrote and directed a novela and even edited the film. You can check it out here: Dos Mujeres. It's hilarious! The cool thing is that the girls got into it and they had guest speakers from many communication fields that inspired them.

There's a lot of fun stuff happening with the girls and even here at the office. My boss makes every intern get a mylatinitas profile (our social network) and write daily blogs and I refused to for a while. I had many ideas but I don't consider myself much of a blogger. I was convinced and now I am part of a Blog Series . Two blog series to be exact. One is called Living in a Virtual World where I blog weekly about how now we live pretty much virtually, from texting to checking your Farmville 90 times a day. My monthly blog is called Immigration 101 and it's just something I am passionate about and it's more of an awareness blog on immigrant issues and how they live in the shadows. So check it out and let me know what you think!

Wait, it's fall already?

Anne Jonas — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 21:28:02 +0000

Hey Dascorps folks! The time is zooming by, as several of you have mentioned. Things are good here, though very busy! A few things that are gong on:

-PCF just launched a new project today - http://videowtf.com/ - it's a collaborative Q&A site related to video production, so I'd love it if you all would stop by and ask/answer questions, and spread the word!

-Several Miro Community sites are now live! There are live sites at http://video.medfield.tv/ , http://mirocommunity.access-scat.org/, and Erica's QUQ site will be at their domain soon, but for now is at http://quq.mirocommunity.org/. I wrote a blog post about Miro Community for pegpoint @ http://pegpoint.org/2009/10/05/connecting-communities-through-online-video .

I've talked to several of you about the Miro Community project, but I thought this would be a good time/place to say that if you think your organization would be interested in moderating/cultivating a local online video community, I'd love to talk to you. PCF has a grant from the Knight Foundation to create these local video sites, and I personally think they can be pretty hard-core and awesome, so I would encourage folks to think about creating one with us if you do local media work!

We have a few other sites that are in the process of being created. So far, the biggest challenge is convincing partners (other than Erica, who got it right away!) of the importance of doing outreach around the site and trying to really make sure we're on the same page about creating a local video community, not just a cool way to display the station videos (though it is that, too). I'm reading up on a variety of community media projects to help me express this better and figure out how we fit in. Besides the local sites, I'm still working on my feminist video site, now housed at nist.tv but not yet public. It's been interesting to me in doing planning for that the different visions people have for community media online. Is it more important to have a curated collection/ an editor's voice, or to have an archive? How do we encourage people to make media that others actually want to watch - what does that look like? These are some of the things I'm thinking a lot about as I continue with that project.

I have finished a draft "Partner Guide" to Miro Community which I will attach once I polish it off a little more, by next month. It's nice to have something tangible like this, though I have found that with this project, the chicken and egg problem comes up again and again. So I've written a guide, but I don't yet have too many real world examples, but it's hard to get real world partners when I don't have a guide/materials to show them... etc. I have grand visions for what is possible but sometimes it feels like people need to see those visions in order to get to them, which is frustrating at times. But we're forging ahead and it's working out!

-I'm headed to Public Media Camp in DC next week. I'm excited about the opportunities there, I'll let you know how it goes.

-I'm still getting used to blog post writing style, which I'm not always the most comfortable with. But I think this is one of those areas where you learn by doing, so I'm trying to just keep going for it.

-I have a ton of PDFs and books that I feel like I should read to help with my project and my overall knowledge, but I haven't been able to get around to doing it. I'm traveling this week, so I'm hoping that will afford some time to dig in to some interesting and relevant material.

-Thanks for all the advice on my previous post. Still adjusting to desk work, etc., and trying to learn to steadily plow through activities and keep track of them along the way. Something I find really interesting about the organizational culture here is that things are very flexible, so our focus can quickly shift. I like this, but it definitely takes some getting used to, so I'm trying to learn to be more flexible while also trying to stay on top of things.

-This month I'm looking forward to seeing the first few sites develop and thrive, as well as setting up new ones. We're releasing our .8 version of the software soon, and now that several sites are up and running I'm really excited to see what will happen with them and how we can build real local video communities. With that comes some anxiety about the collaborative process - except for the feminist video site, I'm not in control of content or really of outreach, so while I can help our partners with those areas, it's at times a challenge to be removed from direct development. But, again, a good one, and a great learning opportunity about capacity building in general.

Beat

Julie Adler — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 20:33:07 +0000

Well it's been awhile since I've posted, and I know I could just copy and paste from my CCTV blog, which I'll do eventually (once I get back to writing longer blog posts instead of just the snippets I've had time to do lately). For now I must say: I am beat. I've never worked so many days in a row in my life, and it's all because I just held the orientation (Saturday, 9/8) and first training session (Sunday, 9/9) for citizen journalists for our new program, NeighborMedia. It went well, but I'm at the point of expiration. I will probably advantage of the Jewish New Year tomorrow to rest and restore.

We're starting to launch CEA programs too (the youth newscast component of my VISTAness), which is something I've been putting on the back burner that I really need to start focusing on. Thankfully there are some other staff members working on those projects with me, so I'm not alone in that endeavor.

Anyway, I'm thinking about posting some of my orientation materials on the wiki but I don't know how useful it would be to anyone else. I'd like to attach the file here but that's not working either (help?), so you can just check it out in my blog at http://www.cctvcambridge.org/node/1814. Does anyone know if there are other citizen journalism projects going on in the ctc vista world?

Bad Link

Tim Wescott — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 17:15:43 +0000

Ooops. My last blog had a bad link. The website is http://www.socialsourcecommons.org

I had originally typed the link as just "socialsourcecommons.org" (which works in your browser, but not in this web software).

Setting up your account and blogging on the new site

Erin Taylor — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 15:56:51 +0000

SETTING UP YOUR ACCOUNT

Begin at http://www.ctcvista.org (On the right, you should see ‘user login’)
Before you can actually login you need to click the link to ‘request new password’ just below the user login.
Fill in your name and/or email address, click ‘email new password’, and you will receive an email with your password. The site will direct you to a login page, but instead check your email and use the second link (the longer one) provided in the email to log in.
The link should take you to a page that says ‘reset password’. Click the ‘log in’ link and find yourself at the ‘account settings’ page under the ‘edit’ tab of your account (your name should be at the top of the page and let you know that you’ve ‘used your one-time login link’)
Set up your account by entering your email address and creating a password for your account. You may also upload a picture for your account if you’d like and/or create a signature. When you’re done, hit login at the bottom of the page.
Still under ‘Account Settings’ you will see two other sections ‘Organization’ and ‘Personal’
Under ‘Organization’ fill in as many fields as you can. When you’re done, press ‘submit’. ****you must hit ‘submit’ at the bottom of the page before moving to a different tab in order to save your info******
Under ‘Personal’ ********you must fill in your name, address, and a number where you can be reached. The Project needs this information for their records and payroll. If you would like to make this information private, you may do so at the bottom of the page.*************** Directly below zip code, and just above submit, you can check a ‘make private’ box so no one else outside of headquarters/administrators can see it.

BLOGGING ON THE NEW SITE

After logging in, you should see your name and possible functions on the right side of the page. Click on the ‘my blog’ link.
Click on ‘post new blog entry’ below your name on the left.
You must give your blog a title and specify the priority area(s) that apply to the content of your blog entry. There is also space for free tags. ********please tag your work (and separate tags with commas)*********** Wonder why tagging is important? Check out http://news.com.com/1606-2-5798694.html?tag=nl
Then type the content of your blog. It’s like a MS Word interface, but you can switch to HTML if you’d like by using the toolbar above. Also in the toolbar is a button for adding images (you can link to images on the web or upload new images to the site).
If you’d like to add file attachments, you can do so by clicking the link just above the preview/submit buttons at the bottom of the page.
FYI: you cannot save drafts of your content in this system, but you can go back and edit your blog entries at any time.
When you’re finished, press the ‘submit’ button at the bottom of the page.