In June 2008 I received a grant for 20 Flip Video Cameras (.pdf) to be used in one of the required courses in the Writing Arts undergraduate major at Rowan, “Writing, Research, and Technology.” The general goal of the course was to extend traditional conceptions of composition by applying it to the medium of video. To accomplish this goal, students competed three primary assignments: 1) a semester-long vlog on their own YouTube channels; 2) a 3 – 5 minute video on the subject, “What Does YouTube Mean to You?“; and 3) an 8 – 10 minute oral history video project grounded in oral history research methodologies. I have discussed the YouTube project on this blog and will discuss the oral history video project at a later date (all videos can be found at the Oral History Video Archive YouTube channel).
This post, however, is going to be specifically about how I integrated the Flip Video camera and related software applications into the course. I have broken the post into 6 primary recommendations.
Recommendation 1: Use the Flip Video Camera and get students to play with it right away
The Flip is designed with a specific purpose: to make video recording, editing, and uploading to the Web as easy as possible. It is light, portable, and durable. It is perfect for a student to take into the field, conduct interviews, and video variety of landscapes. Its wide angle lens helps make it excellent in low-light situations, though zooming in the Ultra series (which we used) is not recommended. If your goal is to create professional quality video productions, the Flip may not be for you. But, if it is perfect for introducing students to video composition, editing techniques, and the rhetorical issues surrounding both.