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Last night I attended the 2008 Showcase for Handsworth Library’s Urban Digital project.

Urban Digital started in 2007.  It’s a community media training programme, based in Handsworth Community Library (HCL).  Originally funded through SRB6 the programme provides access to training and equipment for digital media production in the following areas:

• Video production
• Photography
• Web design
• Graphic design

For the past two years I have been worked on the project as a tutor on the web design strand.

This year’s showcase featured a rich programme of short films across  a spread of genres as diverse as historical documentary, sci-fi and horror.

The film showing was followed by an award ceremony, officiated by Professor Roger Shannon, who has strong links to film making in Handsworth.  Roger commented on the creativity and dedication of the film makers, who achieved a great deal in the 10-weeks of training.  In particular he singled out the creative sound design techniques employed by the film makers (something which is commonly a weak point in the skillset of a new film maker).

In addition to this, I briefly spoke on the achievements of the web design class.

Hopefully somebody will give me some DVDs of the films to upload to You Tube, in the meantime I’ve uploaded some photos of the award ceremony and the red carpet reception that welcomed the students when they arrived at Library Theatre.

Now that SRB6 has finished, the team at HCL have to find new pots of money to fund this work.  Fingers crossed some of the people who came to the event saw the acheivments of these students, and want to back them to develop further.  In the meantime the kit is available for community use at HCL - just make a booking at the front desk (tel: 0121 464 1185).

Today was the last day of the 2008 Urban Digital web design programme.  As ever, it’s a sad but also a proud day when I get to the end of a course.

What I find most interesting about teaching within this environment is the variety of outcomes people are looking for, and the tenacity that some have in striving to achieve their goal.

This year, as last year, students aims have included:

• Developing business based websites
• Developing personal web projects, for example family history archives
• Specific, task based, advice for on-going projects
• Personal development and achievement

Some of the challenges this creates for me as a tutor are:

• The need to maintain a flexible programme that caters for a range of needs, but has an overall structure
• Balancing my own agenda and ideas of what people should be learning against these needs
• Ensuring that we achieve a good level of base knowledge, but at the same time keeping the content relevant to achieving some of the “quick fix” objectives

It’s a much harder balance to strike in this setting than in a more formal teaching environment, but every time we run these courses we get that little bit closer to getting it “just so”.