Zeega and Co

KQED is a Northern California-based television, radio, digital media, and educational service provider.  So, for my reading this week on Technology for Teaching L2 Writing, I decided to check out their piece on web-based video-editing tools: “For Storytelling Projects, Cool New Multimedia Tools.” 

The article briefly outlines three web-based tools for creating text/visual/audio/video-infused multimedia presentations: Meograph, Zeega, and Wevideo.  After checking them out, I’m putting my money on Zeega.  It’s slick.  And it seems to be very user-friendly.  In Katrina Schwartz’s—the author of the article—words, “Zeega allows users to create an interactive web-based story, pulling content from online sources, including photos, music, animated GIFs, and videos.”  Seems straightforward enough, right?  And it’s free. 

As a “Comp Studies” guy, I give these technologies my full endorsement because I think that they deserve a place within a writing program.  Creating a documentary-like multimedia video and the component skills and strategies that go along with it—brainstorming, researching your subject(s), picking an appropriate narrative, cultivating a narrative, revising, editing, publishing—is writing.  Therefore, I don’t see why these sorts of projects shouldn’t be more heavily integrated into standard Composition curricula.  Perhaps because they’re not evidence of “serious, academic learning” or something like that?  Puh-leeeeez.

Projects like these deserve to be taken more seriously.  They’re a way for students to learn that can afford them wow-this-is-so-cool results.  Expression and creation are on the line.   And that can’t ever be underestimated.

One last note: in the Comments section (at the bottom of the blog), I picked off two more web-based video editing sites to scope out: Conducttr, courtesy of Transmedia Storyteller, and Pixorial.