At first glance, the Guardian’s Free Debate project looks very similar to ours (although the website has recently been taken down, and the status of the competition is unknown). Here are two important differences:

• The Guardian’s invitation is to discuss political topics. The Guardian is inviting students to make videos about political topics that the Guardian’s writers take strong positions on. They are asking students to argue for or against an issue that the Guardian has defined as important.
• As a result, the Guardian’s (strange, angry) sample videos show people making arguments (1, b, c) For the Guardian’s purposes, this makes sense. The competition is asking students for opinions about what ought to be, and the natural way to present those opinions is to speak to the camera.

Why isn’t UniLives.com interested in this kind of video? Firstly, purpose of this site is more ethnographic: instead of just showing us yourself, we encourage you to show us footage of the people and places around you. Secondly, instead of us telling you what topics are important, we want you to show us what issues are important to the people around you. Finally, while we are open to students who share political views, prize-winning entries will use film to show us the human side of the political issue you care about.

“A Vision of Students today” is an interesting, creative video by students in a Digital Ethnography class in the USA. In many ways, it’s closer to UniLives than the Guardian’s project: the video is about student life, it features more than one person, and is honest about things that marketing videos would never admit. We like that.

Although “A Vision of Students today” is fascinating, the video has some major weaknesses:

• Students hold up quotations, but the origin of these quotations is not clear.
• The video makes silly numeric claims, such as “only 26% [of assigned readings] are relevant to my life” without context, explanation, evidence, or arguments to support the claim.
• The video is not made for an international audience and assumes familiarity with education systems in the USA.
• By filming things written on paper, the makers of the video didn’t take advantage of film’s ability to show an issue rather than just tell us.

If you’re looking for better examples, last week’s post on “Soul of Athens” links to several great videos about university life.

I filmed this to demonstrate what is possible even using the most basic of audio-visual technology – in this case the camera in my phone! The picture quality and sound are not going to win an award at Cannes, but the film still shows an interesting part of student life.

When we launch on November 19th, you will be able to upload your own videos about student life– whether you’re using the most expensive broadcast-quality equipment, or just your mobile phone. Your inventiveness and imagination have no limits, so share them with us!