J198: First week recap

Part of a continuing series of posts about JOUR 198, our first foray in multimedia reporting here at Lehigh …

So we all survived the first week, and by that I mean all of us. This week was all about basics of working the camera, simple work with video files, and getting them uploaded to YouTube.

The lab assignment was pretty simple: interview another person in class with the camera by asking three questions, download the file to the computer, create a movie with the clip using the video-editing software, then upload to YouTube. The second half of the assignment was to edit that longer clip so there is only one question, create a movie out of that, and upload it. The goal was to just give them a feel for how to work the camera and work the software, plus a very basic editing technique involving simple video cuts.

The sense I got from the students is that they were surprised by how easy it was. The Kodak Zi8 cameras we’re using were chosen just for for that reason, that it’s literally a push-button form of video shooting that is accessible to newbies. There were some questions about the video editing and pressing the wrong buttons there, of course, but overall it was pretty smooth.

Considering that about two-thirds of the students had never worked a video camera before that class, I was pleasantly surprised to see all of the students finish early. So it was good to see some of our planning meet the test of reality.

So they’re good with the technology, I think, even despite a learning curve. What I found myself surprised about was the area where they struggled, such as what to name files so that they could be found more easily. They also didn’t always grasp the difference between a video file represented by an icon on the desktop and a working project within the movie-editing program which allows them to edit the video but leaves the original file untouched. So I will be devoting a little more time toward hammering this home.

I realized in the first week that there are so many things I don’t think about because I’ve worked with the Web for a long time. Even when I was doing print media I was fooling around with Web-page building in my spare time. I built my first HTML Web page in 1994 using a text editor (BBEdit …. represent!). I taught myself CSS and PHP (although I could be much better on the latter). And over the years I suppose I’ve taken for granted the fact that I understand directory structures and the need to name things for organizational purposes, but this stuff is super important if you want to understand the logic and culture of the Web development and exchange.

My colleague Jack Lule put his finger on it yesterday when I was talking with him about this: it’s the difference between being a Web consumer and a Web producer. It’s easy for me to assume so much about this über wired generation, so this part of last week was a learning experience. In this class I am trying to keep my eyes open and learn about what they don’t know, so I spend a few minutes after every session in evaluation mode. Hopefully this will make the growth of this course a bit more organic than other courses I’ve taught.