Three months in pictures…

I figured this long over-due update would be more interesting as a highlight reel with pictures and video:

March 20 — CreateTucker blog event at The Purple Fiddle in Thomas, W.Va.  We had over 50 people attend our two-hour potluck to talk about community, blogging and art!

April 5 — The one-year anniversary of the Upper Big Branch mine disaster in Raleigh County, W.Va.  This day also marked the official hand-over of Faces of The Mine to the Whitesville community.

April 5, 2011 marked the one-year anniversary of the Upper Big Branch mine disaster in Raleigh County, W.Va. Along with West Virginia Uncovered students Paige Lavender and Evan Moore, and Uncovered coordinator Mary Kay McFarland, I traveled to Whitesville, W.Va., to document the memorial service as official press staff. The memorial service itself was a private event for family members of the 29 miners and the disaster rescue workers, but the event was so packed that it was truly standing-room only.

As FoTM coordinators and memorial staff volunteers, Evan, Paige and I spent the day live-streaming the memorial service for those unable to attend, as well as taking video and photos for the FoTM site.

Faces of The Mine logo | property of Faces of The Mine

Though I did not spent much time on Faces of The Mine here, I have never been more proud or fond of a project.  After spending almost a year working closely with the families and community members directly affected by the UBB disaster, I came to have a much more personal involvement in the project than I ever have before.

We are certain that we left the project in good hands, and I’m very excited to see how it progresses.  Whatever Faces of The Mine becomes, we hope it will always serve as a positive remembrance of the 29 miners lost in UBB on April 5, 2010

You can follow the progress of FoTM on Paige’s blog or the West Virginia Uncovered blog, and hopefully here too, if I can get my act together.

Working with Evan (@evancmo on Twitter) and Paige (@paigelealav on Twitter) was a wonderful experience and I think part of what made FoTM so great.  They are both talented and driven people who spent hours and hours working to make the project as successful as possible.  They are also two of the most hilarious and fun people I’ve ever met.  Both have graduated from West Virginia University and are beginning their professional lives.  I hope as busy as we all become in the next few years we will still take the time to keep in touch.

Love these guys!

Filming the Upper Big Branch anniversary service was exhausting, but as Paige, Evan and I returned home, we felt proud of the strength of the Whitesville community and of our joint efforts to create a memorial for the 29 men lost in the UBB mine. Here Evan and Paige, tired and happy for a 10 p.m. IHOP coffee break, attempt energetic smiles before our sleep-deprived group turned into a slap-happy mess.

Memorial Day weekend 2011 — Tucker County again for the ArtSpring event in Davis and Thomas, W.Va.

I spent Memorial Day weekend in Tucker County with some of the bloggers from CreateTucker at the ArtSpring event. The arts walk, which lasted two days, included a silent auction to benefit art programs in Tucker County schools. I met a lot of really interesting people that weekend, including a Twitter friend, @garrettguide (she's a lot of fun, follow her!).

In addition to helping out with the some of the organizational aspects of the arts walk and the silent auction, I agreed to take pictures of the events for use on the CreateTucker blog and for the programs that benefited from the silent auction. Here Bruce Wilson and other ArtSpring organizers tally the proceeds of the silent auction.

Multimedia Workshops Cont.

Tucker County teachers play around with free photo-editing software during a West Virginia Uncovered multimedia workshop. The workshop was held for public school teachers on March 2, 2011 in Parsons, W.Va.

The multimedia workshop for teachers, which took place last Wednesday, was pretty successful!

I shouldn’t sound so surprised, right?  After all, who wouldn’t want to learn about photography, blogging and micro-blogging all day long?  The possibility that comes with this sort of technology is nearly limitless — almost anything a teacher can imagine they’d like to do in the classroom is possible.

But when I threw my alarm clock to the floor at 4 a.m. Wednesday and trudged to my shower, my mind was swimming with any and all conceivable disasters that could befall the first multimedia workshop presented by West Virginia Uncovered for public school teachers.  I think at one point I even imagined a flash flood sweeping away the Subway delivery-person and sandwiches, while hungry teachers resorted to eating the computer equipment in starved desperation.

In actuality, all 14 teachers arrived on-time (not half-eaten by wolves) and excited to learn about different ways they could incorporate technology and social media into their classrooms.  In my experience with teaching anything, one of the most intimidating ideas is that your audience will be entirely uninterested and disengaged with the information you have to present.  While in retrospect Mary Kay and I both realized that we had packed too much information into one workshop, we were delighted by the energy level the teachers brought and sustained throughout its duration.

It was equally energizing for me, especially as feedback and questions about the next workshop rolled in.  I know of two teachers specifically who have already begun class blogs to replace and enhance existing projects:

A kindergarten teacher at Tucker Valley Elementary Middle School will be using a blog to involve parents and family in her students’ learning process.  I met with her again today, one-on-one, to help set up her blog, create calendar pages, insert pictures and fiddle with privacy settings.  As we went through the different options of what is and is not possible on WordPress, her smile just kept getting bigger and bigger.

The Tucker County High School journalism class is also starting a blog to use as its news publication.  The students had become discouraged with trying to put out a print paper every few weeks because their news would be old by the time the paper was ready to pass around.  With the blog, they are hoping to publish their articles and projects much more quickly.

The teacher has also begun to have them play around with photography and natural lighting.  Today they worked on taking a window portrait with natural lighting and it was awesome to see the students so engaged with their class.

We are now beginning work on the second multimedia workshop, this time focusing on video.  I am hoping the turnout a second time around will be equally inspiring — and that I don’t worry myself sick like I did this last time.

Multimedia workshops in Tucker County

As I think I’ve mentioned before, my time spent as the West Virginia Uncovered AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer is split into three projects – helping Uncovered’s fearless leader Mary Kay McFarland with community outreach for the class, working in the Charleston area on Faces of The Mine, and visiting Tucker County, W.Va., to help The Parsons Advocate build citizen media contributions.

As a subproject of the citizen media initiative in Tucker County, I spent much of the past few months visiting the Tucker County public schools to bring media and technology into the classrooms.  This involved coaching high school and middle school classes with their multimedia efforts and advising the students on various photo, video, audio and interview techniques.

This blog might be more interesting if I had taken the time to write about some of the struggles I was having in these areas – not the least of which is the fact that I did not go to school to teach – but I didn’t, and so here we are.  Suffice to say, one of my largest struggles was with the idea that my visits were purposeless.  Other than immediate gratification, what was the point of visiting a high school every week if all that could be shown for it were a few videos at the end of the school year?

Enter another favorite AmeriCorps catchphrase: capacity-building.  Though I was sick of the idea after hearing it every two seconds at training, all I can say now is thank god for capacity-building.  It has removed me from the temptation to bang my head against the cinder-block walls of public education until my skull cracks and my defeated brain oozes to the floor.  This semester, rather than the focus being solely on weekly visits, I’m helping to coordinate and instruct a free multimedia workshop for teachers.

On March 2, next Wednesday, Mary Kay and I will hit the road for Tucker at 6 a.m. and spend the day showing teachers – rather than students – how technology and social media can be used affectively.  We will show basic photography skills and editing software, guide them through blogging on WordPress and connecting via Twitter.   And the best part is that they want to be there.  The second best part is that there will be no discussion of whom the star quarterback hooked up with by the water cooler.

Not that this coordination hasn’t been without its own share of problems (a real life Professor Umbridge, for example), but those are for another time accompanied by a bottle or two of Riesling.

Faces of the Mine

The past few weeks have been busy with the soft launch of the Upper Big Branch project: Faces of the Mine— an interactive memorial dedicated to the lives affected by the UBB disaster — is up and running, ready for user content, participation and suggestions.

Over the past months, my partner, Paige Lavender and I have spent weekends in and around Whitesville, W.Va., getting to know the community and building plans for this project.  We’re excited to see what comes out of this, and hopefully I’ll remember to post about it further.

For now, here’s a link to a blog post I wrote for the project site explaining some of the project’s background and goals.

An account of Immersion Weekend

The West Virginia Uncovered crew spends its last hour together at Immersion Weekend in Elkins, W.Va., viewing each of the nearly finished products.

At 1:30 pm yesterday, a group of tired but satisfied students checked out of the Holiday Inn Express in Elkins, W.Va., having successfully made it through another West Virginia Uncovered Immersion Weekend.

One of the most intensive experiences at WVU’s School of Journalism, Immersion Weekend gives students a glimpse of real world deadlines and pressures in four days of intense reporting, editing and story-telling.  Twelve students, four instructors and two helpers made up this year’s cast and we are happy to report that six thorough, well-developed stories have emerged from the frenzied footage-gathering.

This year saw several changes that differentiated the experience from last year’s — and mostly for the better:

West Virginia Uncovered student Mallory Bracken goes through her story photos with Bob Lynn during Uncovered's 2011 Immersion Weekend.

An extra instructor was key in providing the students with enough feedback and attention to go around.  Our go-to experts this year were Doug Mitchell, of National Public Radio renown; Bob Lynn, award-winning newspaper photographer and editor; Sara Magee, a favorite professor at the WVU J-School and an Emmy award-winning TV news producer; and Mary Kay McFarland, head of the West Virginia Uncovered project.

After last year’s Immersion Weekend, which was defined by a nearly panicked rush to completely finish the projects by the last day, Mary Kay decided to relax the deadline a little bit.  Student’s still had a finished product by the end of this weekend, but are allowed an extra day in class to fine-tune their edits.  This was beneficial because it kept stress levels from becoming counter-productive.  While the students are going to do some tweaking in class this week, many of the stories are already very solid, and this next week will only add a little extra polish.

Students mentioned throughout the weekend how much they appreciated these changes, especially veteran Uncovered students who remembered Immersion Weekend 2010.

This weekend did a lot to strengthen the technical skills of the Uncovered crew, but several instructors particularly admired another sort of strengthening.

Evan Moore, a West Virginia Uncovered student, at Immersion weekend 2011.

Magee and Mitchell commented on the rapport between the students, who did little but laugh and tease all weekend.  The sort of relationship building and bonding that occurred this weekend will extend far into the future, they said, and will help students as they build their careers.  In the cutthroat world of journalism, the support these students give one another will be a great asset.

After long days of reporting and editing, students were more than happy to hang out a little longer at some of the local bars.

Uncovered is lucky to have a talented and good-natured group this year and I am excited to see what else comes out of the program.

WV Uncovered Immersion Weekend

Immersion Weekend 2011 in Elkins, W.Va., has been excellent so far.

Students Evan Moore and Samantha Cossick present a working edit of their story to instructors Mary Kay McFarland and Doug Mitchell at West Virginia Uncovered's 2011 Immersion Weekend in Elkins, W.Va.

Six groups have been assigned stories ranging from the traditional art of repairing “old-time” instruments, the generational skills passed down in a family butcher shop, and powers of love and inter-connectedness encouraged by a shaman and artist.

Instructors this year are Bob Lynn, an award-winning photographer and editor; Doug Mitchell, a renowned producer and trainer with National Public Radio; Sara Magee, one of the J-School’s own and an Emmy award-winning TV news producer; and, of course, Mary Kay McFarland, fearless leader of WV Uncovered.

Live tweets of the story-making/editing process can be followed on Twitter under the hash-tag #immersionweekend.

Upper Big Branch

One third of my time with AmeriCorps and West Virginia Uncovered has been spent down around Charleston, W.Va., working on an interactive memorial project for the Upper Big Branch mine disaster of last April.  My partner in the project, Paige Lavender, and I spent a lot of time last semester around the Montcoal/Whitesville area interviewing and getting to know the local community members to gauge what kind of contribution would help the community most.

In our time around the area, we met a very kind and welcoming community that welcomed us into their homes, churches, community meetings and lives.

This weekend I got the chance to meet up with Paige and the newest addition to the project, Evan Moore, to discuss our game plan for the project and the next few months.  We’ve got a lot of work to do to have every thing ready for our project launch date of April 5, the anniversary of the disaster, including building a Web site, editing content and encouraging community submissions through a soft launch of the site.

We will be fiddling around with WordPress between our meetings with the communities around Charleston and I’m really excited to see what comes out of our partnerships.

I’ll be sure to keep updating about the project as it progresses.

A new semester brings some changes to WVUncovered

I’m falling prey to one of the greatest struggles of blogging with these in-frequent updates.

Over West Virginia University’s winter break I was lucky to dig my nose into a few pretty cool opportunities, which I will post later.

Right now, I’m sitting in the classroom of the West Virginia Uncovered project as Mary Kay goes over the project to new students.  With the new semester comes a few changes to the project that we hope will allow Uncovered to work more smoothly for both the students and contributing newspapers.

Juggling the needs of the contributing papers with an optimal learning pace for students and the WVU academic schedule has been difficult for this project in the past.  A lot of students struggle with learning whole new mediums and methods of story-telling (this is the WVU Journalism School’s only documentary class) in a very hectic, fast-paced semester.  I spent my senior year of college working with Uncovered, and while it was the most demanding of any journalism class I had taken, it was also the most rewarding.

You can read about student experiences with the project in the West Virginia Uncovered blog.

The pace of Immersion Weekend, one of the highlights of Uncovered’s spring semester, will be less hectic this year.  Students have two projects to complete this semester instead of three, which will allow for more fine-tuning and probably less stress all around. Instead of partnering students with five to 10 papers as we have done in the past, we are also testing the success of working with one paper.

It will be interesting to see how this all works out.  While I think the slower pace will be more conducive to a learning environment for most students, the fast-paced imitation of real-world deadlines and struggles are some of the things I really appreciated about the class.

If I were to list my best experiences at WVU, the Uncovered project would be safely in the top five.  I learned more as a student in West Virginia Uncovered than I learned in the majority of my other classes, combined.  This is one of the most innovative and down-to-earth projects at WVU, and I hope to see it thrive in the future.

Blogger events/Party invite

So it’s been a while.  What does it say about me that I’m pushing the Parsons Advocate bloggers to update regularly, and I can’t even keep up my own blog?

I was spurred to make this update — which I’ve been meaning to do for a while — after I received an email alert to a comment about getting the community excited about the blogs.  I’m happy to say that we’ve finally got something in the works.

The bloggers of CreateTucker were able to get together this past Thursday to talk about both the direction of the blog and what sort of things we could do to stimulate readership and conversation.  We decided on hosting an event, to take place February 6, where community members can come out to enjoy local music, food, beer and good conversation.

John Bright of The Purple Fiddle has offered up his space for the event and we’re hoping to invite the bloggers of TuckerCravings to make it a joint effort with a potluck/recipe swap.  Seth Pitt has offered to corral some local musicians into starting a jam session, as well as setting up a creative activity, such as button making.  We’re still looking for ideas and input, and we’re open to everything.  So if you have an idea that you would like to see, let us know!

Basically it’s gonna be a party.  Ya’ll should come.

Parsons Advocate Mobile App

In lieu of my regular schedule in Tucker County, this week I was lucky to attend the first Parsons Advocate Mobile App workshop, hosted by Dana Coester of West Virginia University and the Advocate.  I’d heard about the project from my supervisor before, but I wasn’t really sure what it was all about until this week.

Lois Nelson (right) and Jenny Newland of the Canaan Valley Institute fill out a survey during the Parsons Advocate Mobile App workshop.

As part of her research, Dana has initiated working with the Advocate to develop a mobile application for businesses around the area.  Through the mobile app, users can see the latest happenings around Tucker and participate in specials or other advertising offers provided by the businesses.  With the heavy tourism industry in and around Tucker, the app will likely draw a lot of business out of people looking to enjoy the great outdoors from places like Washington D.C., Maryland and around West Virginia.  The application will be piloted for six months and available only on the iPhone.  After testing the app and compiling data for that six months, the app will be made available for other smartphones as well.

Over 20 area businesses attended the Parsons Advocate Mobile App workshop, hosted at Blackwater Falls.

The workshop had a great turnout with over 20 businesses represented, and if all goes well with the pilot, we’re hoping more businesses will see the benefit and hop on-board too.

I thought it was pretty cool to see how people like Dana, the Advocate and the local businesses are spearheading a new mode of advertising.  Without any background in that world, I hadn’t realized that advertising is changing just as rapidly as the journalism world.  We’re dealing with new models all across the board, and if Dana is correct the mobile app for smartphones will soon become a multi-billion dollar industry.

It’s great to see somewhere as wonderful as Tucker County take advantage of this opportunity in its early stages.