Tom Hoffman points to an O'Reilly Network article by Jon Udell talking about the convergence of weblogs, which are mostly text, and the posting of various media types such as music, audio interviews, pictures and video. I've been thinking about how multipurpose devices are allowing people to share their experience with not only still images, but video and audio. The nature of tools such as Moveable Type make it very easy to upload these media items and then wrap them around some text with a bit of context and share them with others. In late July I visited Chicago with my oldest daughter and we went to Millennium Park. I used my Canon S50 to take some pictures and also some AVI video. This particular camera, like many today, will allow you to take short video clips. While the files are not broadcast quality, they are just fine for sharing a bit of the experience with those who might stumble on to your weblog. I did a quick import into iMovie and the result is the little 975k clip linked to the right. On this particular afternoon there was a tremendous thunderstorm. The still images I took captured some of this, but the ability to capture the motion and the audio gave our family back home a much better idea of how hard it was raining.

Having a device that will allow you to capture not only stills, but moving images and audio allows one to begin to think differently about how we share our experience with others. In the classroom this can be very interesting. While digital video with a DV camera is something that has been around for a few years, I have found that the whole process of plugging in cables and such to be a limiting factor. If I can give students digital cameras that also have video capabilities, then getting those files into the computer is just a USB cable away.

This year we plan to work with some of our older students on projects involving the creation of weblogs that capture the daily experience of what goes on at Lewis Elementary. We hope to include video, audio, still images and text to give people an idea of what school is like at Lewis.

Speaking of daily experience. A very interesting implementation of video and a weblog is Mike Sloan’s Daily Experience video blog…