Wednesday was a big day for me in terms of university work. I had a 1,000-word essay due for my Documentary Studies class, and my studio group had booked time at 3RRR in the afternoon to record a demo for our hour-long radio programme.
Soundcloud
The RRR studio is set up with an integrated computer that can capture and record anything that goes through the mixing panel. This is how we recorded our demo programme, using Audacity on the studio computer to record the output of our programme, which I then dumped to a USB drive as an MP3. After I got home I uploaded the show to Soundcloud and shared the link with my group in our Facebook group so that we could all annotate it with notes and comments. This is how we’ll submit the demo for assessment purposes to our studio leader.
Surprisingly, looking at my Facebook activity log, I barely interacted with Facebook for consumption/entertainment purposes today. Most of my activity took place in my studio group’s private Facebook group, where we discussed and coordinated our arrival at RRR and made sure that everyone was still on track to record our demo. Georgia, one of the members of our group, has been terribly sick for a couple of weeks so we’ve all made deliberate efforts to make sure our discussions occur online, so Georgia can still be involved and in the loop even though she’s not physically present. We posted a couple of comment threads: one to discuss errors and mistakes in the demo (which we’ll collate into a single list for when we present our demo to the class), and one for potential social media posts that could accompany our show. I also posted a photo I took of our presenters and guest in the studio, which we will use for our reflection posts and could be used for other social media purposes in the future.
Blackboard / RMIT Library
After I’d finished working on our demo, I moved on to finishing my essay for Documentary Studies. I accessed a number of journals, websites and other resources I had found that were relevant to my essay. I found most of these by searching Google Scholar or by searching the RMIT Library website for terms like “documentary ethics” and The Thin Blue Line (the film my essay is about). Some of the sources I found include:
- Journal of Mass Media Ethics
- The New York Times
- Screen journal
- Screen Education journal
- Introduction to Documentary by Bill Nichols
I downloaded copies of these resources to my computer and printed them out so I could physically highlight relevant passages, before then hand-typing those passages back into my essay working document. This is the first essay I’ve completed without using any offline sources at all, so these online resources were very useful in completing my work.