Shared Practice Through Video

[Summary: Handy guide to all the stages of creating a video of a youth project; from selecting equipment and sorting out consent; to planning, shooting and editing your film]

The Open University have been working on developing a new space in their  Practice Based Professional Learning (PBPL) environment for youth workers; and I was asked to put together a short guide on how youth practitioners can create video content to share insights into their own practice.

The result is ‘Shared Practice Through Video‘, which, in the spirit of sharing, is under a Creative Commons license and available for download as a PDF here.

You can also browse through it on Scribd over here. The guide won’t win any design awards (in fact, if anyone fancies taking advantage of the Creative Commons nature to remix it into a slightly more stylish design I’ll happily send you all the original material), but it does take you through all the stages of creating a video in the context of a youth project (or other project contexts for that matter).

Video Change Update: Bananas, 6 Million More and Air Guitar

A little while back I blogged about something called 'Video Change' – and I've spent quite a bit of the last seven weeks facilitating it. Video Change is a pilot online course/shared learning journey, delivered using Ning, that has aimed to support campaigners to create online video as part of their social justice campaigning activity.

I'll be blogging a little more about the whole process, and some of what we have learnt later on – but for now – just wanted to share with you a little of what the Video Change participants have been creating:

Whilst on the topic of online video for campaigning – here's a note I got from Kerstin Twachtmann at ActionAid last week which may be of interest:

Our youth team are attempting to smash the world record for the biggest number of people playing their air guitars at this year’s Reading festival!

As part of this we are running an online competition with the chance to win a pair of tickets to this year’s festival, all the entrants have to do is upload their own air guitar video onto http://www.myspace.com/bollockstopoverty. (The closing date is the 15th August) We have already created a series of videos to get people in the spirit of things and we would be most grateful if could mention it in your blog!

If you're interested in seeing how charities can explore engaging with the norms of many online video sites – then Action Aid's experiment is well worth taking a look at (and, if you're up for playing some Air Guitar in the next few days, joining in with…).

Video Change: online video for campaigners


Find more videos like this on Video Change

 

Sometime last year on the way to an Oxfam Youth Board residential I scribbled down a back-of-the-envelope idea for running an online learning journey for campaigners on using social media tools in their local campaigning.

The idea progressed from envelope to project proposal, moved to a focus on online video and morphed into a project plan.

And in a couple of weeks – the project moves from project plan, to actual project. The actual project is taking the form of a six-week 'course' going by the name of Video Change – one topic and task each week relating to creating, sharing and campaigning with online video. We'll be using a Ning network to bring together the participants and run the project – and hopefully by the end of it we should have some pretty nifty video clips to contribute to Oxfam's soon-to-be-launched Sisters on the Planet campaign.

Video Change is for beginners and experienced video makers and social media people alike – so if you're interested in the issues Oxfam campaigns on and in exploring video for social change – then do sign up to take part.

And if you want a bit more a sense of what it's all about – then you can check out my first attempt at a video for the project above.