Media camps for young people, aged 16-24 are taking place in Weymouth & Portland – host borough for the London 2012 Sailing Events – between July and September this summer as part of Maritime Mix – London 2012 Cultural Olympiad by the Sea
#media2012 is a UK-wide collaboration aiming to foster relations between citizen and professional journalists, and encourage unaccredited reporters to explore the stories behind and around the Olympic and Paralympic Games. It also strives to make links with subsequent Olympic host cities (most immediately Sochi, Winter Games 2014, and Rio de Janeiro, Summer Games 2016) to ensure the regular participation of citizen journalists at the Olympic & Paralympic Games.
Continuing from work begun at the W2 Media Centre during the Vancouver 2010 Winter Games (dubbed the first “twitter Olympics”), #media2012 will see a variety of citizen journalist projects rolled out across the UK in the summer of 2012, supported by the London 2012 Creative Programmers in Scotland and the North West and South West of England.
As part of this activity, the #media2012 South West of England hub (a partnership between Watershed, Bristol; Weymouth College; the University of Bath; b-side and the London 2012 Creative programmer for the SW) is running a series of four “#media2012 summer camps” for young people/students, aged 16-24, in Weymouth and Portland in collaboration with Weymouth College.
For more information please contact liz.milner@watershed.co.uk
Our RELAYS colleagues at Bristol University have once again arranged a fantastic opportunty for 1300 or so Bristol Secondary school pupils to sample a whole range of sports at their Combe Dingle Sports Complex. The first day, yesterday Monday 26th, had 300 children from central Brisatol schools trying out Lacrosse, Golf, Basketball, BMX, Street Dance, Ultimate Frisbee, Fencing and Handball amongst many others. You can read more about it, and watch some films of the activities and listen to interviews with participants, teachers and volunteers here.
You can also see photographs from the Festival in the gallery
In anticipation of our increasing involvement with #media2012, we’ve started a flickr account where we’ll post photos of our young citizen journalists going about their business! You can see a slide show of the images we’ve added so far and these all feed into the #media2012 site where other media hubs across the country who are part of the project send their photos too – the intention is to reveal as many aspects of the London 2012 Games as possible via citizen journalism. We’ve followed the progress of our projects form the very beginning and it’s been great to watch the confidence of the participants grow as they learn new skills and become more familiar with the technology.
There’ll be some more citizen journalism training sessions starting soon with students from various locations, building up to our visits to some of the media camps we’re helping to organise in Weymouth during the Games – more details soon!
David Goldblatt and tutor Sacha Butterworth are working once again with some of the students from City of Bristol College who took part in Oktoberfest. This time they are looking at the topic of young people and disability in sport. The project is part of research that Dr Emma Rich and colleagues at Bath University are carrying out about barriers to participation in sport and is being supported by RELAYS at Watershed, Matthew Swindells, RELAYS PhD student at UWE, and Greg Sharp, Sports Development Manager at the University of Bath, also a RELAYS colleague.
The students will be interviewing and filming young athletes in training at Bath University’s Sports Village which is hosting individuals and squads who are in training for the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, and beyond. There’s also a good chance the citizen journalists will get an interview with Ben Rushgrove, a professional disability runner from Bath.
You can see the last post about our third citizen journalism project here but we’re already discussing a new and imminent project with Dr Emma Rich from Bath University and RELAYS colleagues around sport and disability, more news as details are firmed up.
Negotiations are already underway with a range of people in Weymouth around finding accommodation for our citizen journalism students and acquiring access to a technical base for next summer’s planned visit to report on the Olympic sailing and windsurfing and also hopefully to the opening events.
Meanwhile come back soon to find out details of an Olympic-related event at Watershed in late November – our friend David Goldblatt has written a book with colleague Jonny Acton called How to Watch the Olympics and we’re having a book-launch evening to celebrate.
We’ve been working with media students and tutors from City of Bristol College on our latest excursion into citizen journalism. The event we covered this time was Oktoberfest – not the beery one in Germany but a two-wheeled challenge in Ashton Court! Oktoberfest is a day-long mountain bike competition that attracts hundreds of participants from far and wide who ride the new trail in Ashton Court several times over – fastest time wins a prize! Cycling has been a bit of a theme these last few months and there’s an interview with Cyclescreen’s Tommy Curtis from Oktoberfest on one of the student blogs!
Before we took on the bikers on Saturday we began training sessions with the students at the beginning of October at the College, Watershed and the Pervasive Media Studio and then sent them out into the city (with support and smart phones!) to try out their reporting skills for half a day in Stokes Croft. You can learn more about the project here and links to the student blogs are as follows: Group A, Group B, Group C and Group D. (more…)
Students and young people from the b-side project had a day-long training session at Weymouth College on 15th July with David Golblatt on ‘how to be a citizen journalist’ and went on to apply their newly acquired skills at the Open Weekend. This marked a year until the Olympics begins and on Weymouth’s lovely sandy beech and in nearby Portland there were a number events and activities on offer as part of the celebrations.
The young journalists used e-mail, photos, video and iPadio on smart phones to cover the events, interview the people who’d organised them and report on locals’ and visitors’ thoughts on the forthcoming Olympics Sailing events in Weymouth. The material was uploaded to the Weymouth 2012 posterous blog and you can find out more about the project on the Watershed RELAYS blog
Over the last few weeks we’ve been working on a pilot RELAYS project here at Watershed (see post below) with our partner school Fairfield High and our sports broadcasting friend David Goldblatt. You can learn more about the project from our blog and also find out how the young journalists got on with live blogging and iPadio reporting at the Bristol City v Doncaster football match on Saturday 2nd April. Bristol City Football Club had generously provided free access to the Press stand and post match press conference for some of our students. This was our first attempt at using smart phones for journalism and although we lost a few blog posts, didn’t quite manage to get great photos, couldn’t always connect to iPadio, the young team nevertheless did achieve a massive amount and we all had a really good afternoon! One of our students said ‘I really liked the press conference it made me feel pro’! (more…)
Today was the first session of our new RELAYS project with Fairfield High School’s BTEC media students to support them in honing their technology and social networking skills to the point where they will be ready to report back, live, from a football match in Bristol in April. They’re setting up blogs and ‘phlogs’ where they can phone in their reports and post photos and video, and learning how technology is changing the way we receive news, and how they can create news themselves. We’ve set up our own blog for this project which you can find here
