Wednesday, August 22, 2007

What's the Point?

That's Socratic, isn't it, although I don't recall Socrates phrasing it in quite so depressing a manner. Below you will find 270 happy seconds of video from our Major/Minor Fair. I think I would like my students to be able to do something similar. It's idiot easy. To me the *point* is the amateurism. That is, with minimal care and expertise a student print journalist can add extra value to her/his posted story.

That value is:

* a face

* a voice

* a mode, and perhaps a mood, of communicating.

The point is not polish. Polish takes time, and I wish to spend time on the basic skills of newsjudging, newsgathering and newswriting, which seem to recede farther and farther into the distance in this age of convergence. Yet I still think a modest level of skill in audio and video is useful, the value perhaps in inverse proportion to its modesty, at least in a first or second print course.

I am, of course, open to discussion. Didn't I name our new cat Cat 2.0?

(Actually, no. Clever name, though. Feel free.)

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