[Note from Hanson Hosein, MCDM Director: This is a guest blog post by Donald Giesen, Seattle native, now in Nairobi, Kenya as Executive Director of the East African School of Media Studies. Please see below for Donald's request for donations of any old spare DV cameras you might have.]

Here in Kenya, many media practitioners still hesitate to get on the train that is the internet. Perhaps we are too used to our decrepit, colonial-era locomotives which are never in a hurry to get anywhere. We figure that we can always hop on board even if we’re caught napping when it leaves the station.

But I’m afraid this “train” is more like the bullet trains found in Japan- if you’re not in your seat by the time the whistle blows, you’ve got a looong walk ahead of you.

Strained analogy aside, the changes that the internet has brought in terms of media creation, distribution and consumption are real and those of us who are too slow in embracing this change risk getting left behind.

So when my students were given the opportunity to work on a collaborative project with MCDM, I wouldn’t have dared to let the opportunity pass.
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MCDM student Nicole Collins shot the film above as part of my Multimedia Storytelling class this winter.  The course stressed storytelling structure (Aristotle, Joseph Campbell), as well as the benefits of using amateur technology (Nicole used a Flip Mino HD and iMovie) to tell stories to a larger audience.

Then, we teamed up with community “clients,” in this case, Seattle’s Pacific Science Center to prove how storytelling could help reach an audience.  The PSC’s Stan Orchard was so thrilled with our students’ work, he featured Nicole’s film on the upcoming Geocaching Exhibit’s homepage, and included all of the films on the PSC site.

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