Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

This afternoon I returned from a three day stint in Stockholm in the company of Anders and Raymond. As the last time it involved a good amount of talking about videoblogging and general hilariousness. Along with Raymond I did a two-hour open lecture on Wednesday about videoblogging in general, and Thursday the three of us did a full-day workshop on the practicalities of videoblogging — both at Medieteknik at Södertörns University College. This combination worked really well as we could paint broad strokes at the lecture and get nitty-gritty the following day.

I didn't record any video there — that was the students' job, not mine. You can find links to the student blogs and other randomness (like videoblog examples) on the workshop blog. I have also put up some photos on 23 and I'm sure Raymond and/or Anders will put up photos and/or video later.

I did learn a lot at the workshop myself. After seeing the students run around with their own digital cameras (and playing with the Ixus 750 that both Anders and Raymond use), I'm convinced digital still cameras are the way to go for videoblogging. Those are awesome tools, the quality is good enough and the ease-of-use beats anything else. I was also surprised at how fast the students all grasped how editing in Quicktime Pro works. I was prepared to spend much time explaning the logic behind Quicktime's editing interface, but it was intuitive to all of them immediately.

Finally it warmed my little, interactive heart to have two students create a credits page for their movie and without any encouragement ask Anders how they could make their links clickable. Sadly, there is not a really easy way to do this yet (we didn't have time to explain eZedia and similar). It was great to see that they had gotten that videoblogging is video crafted for the web and not traditional video.

Thanks to Anne and Hannes who took care of us, and to the rest of the faculty for dealing with us during lunches and dinner Thursday. It was great talking with everyone and I learned much about media education in Sweden.

In this age of blogging feedback is public, so it's fantastic to see Annika write:

Idag har vi haft en videobloggworkshop. Det var kul och lärorikt, det var inte så krångligt som jag trodde att det skulle vara, en bra workshop! Jag får väl skaffa mig en kamera som jag kan filma med så det blir fart på mitt videobloggande.

It is also great to see how verbs are conjugated in Swedish!