Rental Computers, Southern Baptists, and Hurtles

Boy oh boy was I nervous at first about including video as part of our project. First of all, I like standing behind the camera, not in front of it.  But then when we viewed everyone's videos and I saw how some students had really great introductory videos both being on screen and off, I felt a lot more comfortable with the idea.

I agree that there are a lot of problems that go along with including videos (or any sort of multimedia).  It's time consuming.  We have varying skills with videos, video-editing, etc.  Some of us don't have the technology to work easily with videos at home (for example, my laptop kicked-the-bucket a couple of weeks ago and I've been using a rental computer... the webcam doesn't even work).

HOWEVER.  Opening ourselves up to using multimedia is brilliant because, as someone pointed out in class, it gives us a greater potential audience.  Some people would rather read through material.  Some would rather watch a video. We can provide both.  And knowing that we have video editing software available to us on campus solves the problem of personal computers lacking that capability.  The key, I think, to keep from getting stressed out is to set and adhere to time limits.  Now this doesn't mean you close your computer after working two hours on a project regardless of whether or not it's finished, but we have to set general limits.  It's easy to go overboard.  The results can be fantastic, but we also have to look realistically at what we need to accomplish.

Thinking about videos and multimedia in regard to the themes I am working on, I think both could benefit greatly from this idea.  Brave New Worlds is rather obvious.  There is a lot you can do there with the theme of exploration.  In addition, the idea of using multimedia is, in and of itself, a Brave New World.  The way we are going about the project is already an exemplification of the theme.

Plough Boys was a little harder to think about.  You say reformation, I think old men haranguing congregations about Hell fire and damnation.  Maybe that's just the ghosts of my Southern-Baptist ancestors clinging to my mind though.  But the more I thought about it, this idea totally works.  The Reformation was all about making things more accessible to the common man.  Multimedia is one way our project becomes more accessible.  But even more than that, think about it.  Sure, a big part of the Reformation was people reading the Word of God.  An even bigger part though?  Hearing it!  They weren't just reading.  They were going to church and listening to preachers.  What a better way to exemplify this that actually have an audio/visual component???

Anyway, that's the skinny on my thinking as we move ahead in the project.  There are a lot of hurtles to jump, but I'm excited to see where this goes.