As part of some of our International PACE placements, students make videos and narrated slideshows. Our overseas partners also use videos to communicate, or they wish to use video. The increasingly widespread availability of video cameras, standard on many smartphones and even on some inexpensive digital cameras, and the ability to use online platforms to distribute those videos widely, has made video an increasingly attractive option for fundraising, raising public awareness, social advocacy, and education.
During the course of working with our PACE International partners, some of them asked to get access to the same teaching resources that we used with our students. They wanted to be able to craft their own online and video presentations. In addition, we found that having students work together with the partners to produce videos, digital stories, and other media was a way that their work-integrated learning could concretely help our partners. In addition, as we have prepared the videos for this project, we have learned a lot about using video and photography in co-creation: this module is an attempt to share some of those lessons.
The exercises and activities in the Creating Videos for Community Advocacy module have been used with students, overseas partners, and other groups. Unlike some of the other modules in Classroom of Many Cultures, they are fairly dense with technical material, so they may involve more one-way training. Whomever will facilitate these workshops may need to do preparation work. But we need to point out that the workshop has been run repeatedly by staff who are not trained in video or media production, although they do experiment with making their own videos.
The Module provides many links to videos and other resources that provide technical information and practical, 'how to' guides to using video equipment. These links do not constitute an endorsement of products, and users are encouraged to send feedback if they know of better resources or want to share their own advice. Part of the co-creation method used by Classroom of Many Cultures is to recognise that even the instructor often has much to learn: in the area of media production, rapid technology change and the variability of equipment makes this especially true.
The most important advice about video and media production, however, is that we learn by doing. These programs and technologies are so complicated that learning, in advance, how to use them without trialling them is virtually impossible. Make a digital story. Or a short video. Show them to another student or someone else in your organisation. See what you like. Study videos that you think are effective. You, your students, and your colleagues can learn a great deal from each other.