Learning from Media Virgins

TUESDAYS MEAN FOUR HOURS of contact time with a very creative group of multimedia students and today's session resulted in one of the highest-energy podcasts ever to land in my Dropbox. Several different groups of students recorded segments separately, then dropped them into a post-production process connected to a dropbox in the cloud. Even though that 50 GB of swap space has resulted in a few errors (i.e., some working files were inadvertently deleted by classmates who didn't realise the difference between "cutting" and "copying" files), using a community workspace properly is one of the most critical skillsets we can teach at third level in Ireland. The artwork (at left) appeared from several cameras and Flickr photo collections, most of the images sourced on the same day the recordings were made. A big thanks to Liam Burke, denise cox, and Mike Maunsell for setting aside time to talk. Although some of the recording levels reveal weaknesses in technique (and some problems with older cables), the overall process and hour-long audio result [53 MB MP3 file] is better than most community radio segments broadcast in Ireland today. Drop over to Media Virgins.com for more details and to see elements of the creative process on screen.

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Artwork by Ben Hennessy. Podcast produced on the southern campus of Tipperary Institute.

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