photo by Bryan Fenstermacher (CC)

Starting today, you can sign up to share your video about university experience on UniLives.com. If you are a student or student organisation and upload a video between now and May 2010, your video could be part of our prize competition!

UniLives.com is a volunteer project, supported by our sponsors. Thanks team!

The Varieties of Student Videos

As we prepare to open for video uploads, we have been sending invitations to creators of already-published films whose videos we think would be great for UniLives.com. As a result, we have gained a fairly comprehensive introduction to the genres of videos about university life. Here are some of them:

Vlogging To Friends & Family: Students living away from home often make videos of their friends, their accommodation, the landscape, food, and other parts of their life. These videos are great for UniLives, especially when they show people, and discuss what life is like at university. Such videos already expect to explain things to an unfamiliar audience and would fit well into our international perspective. Examples:

• Tour of My Room at Peking University, Beijing (heydude819)
• Dining Hall, Tsinghua University, Beijing (frank5457)
• Working out at the University of Wisconsin (HandelandJ) (also, Making a Peanut Butter & Egg Sandwich)
• Trying to Study in the University of Hawaii Library (josephcfl)

Parties: A large number of university-related videos show, or claim to show drunken parties. Once we filter out the porn and the embarrassing films posted by friends, the list of remaining videos is fascinating.

• US Students opinions on lowering the drinking age. (SevenDaysVT) (great format!)
• Palmer Fest. We blogged this journalistic piece from Soul of Athens a few weeks ago; it’s about student party violence in Athens, Georgia.
• Comparison of American and Korean university party culture (sadly, only the first part) (obee777 has posted several videos about koren students abroad)

Over the next few days, as we look for videos we can invite to the site, I’m going to be posting more examples of videos about university life. Look out for The Event, The Joke, Internal Marketing, and Libraries Trying To Be Relevant.

Before the opening of video uploads on Nov 16, we’re posting ideas and examples of videos about university experience worldwide. Sometimes, simple interviews can make great video projects, especially when you put interviews next to each other. In this series on adjunct faculty in the USA, the Chronicle of Higher Education creates an informative montage about university life.

Why does this work better than the sample videos on Free-D? The Chronicle’s videos are edited by the people who conducted the interviews, not the people who are speaking. Even though the interviewer is not shown, these videos highlight the interests of the interviewer, who asks the questions and edits the final videos to highlight the personality and experience of the person interviewed.

We love how these videos show the background, personality, and motivations of each adjunct professor. We also like that these videos talk about important issues for universities about hiring practices, professor workload, and pay.

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!

Soul Of Athens, created by over 50 students and faculty at the Ohio University School of Visual Communication, is a great repository of documentary shorts about Athens County, Ohio. We really love their collaborative approach, and the way in which they use a short format to create an online montage about a place. In addition, their interactive photography pieces, such as “Soles of Athens” demonstrate the informative, evocative power of simple photographs of a single part of human life– in this case shoes.

Soul of Athens features several great short films touching on student life:

• Rolling Thunder is about the annual quad rugby tournament, which is hosted at Ohio University School of Physical Therapy. Quad rugby is played in wheelchairs.
• Palmer Fest.This year’s annual Palmer Fest started peacefully and then turned ugly by nightfall, as some of the student revelers clashed with Athens police.
• Community Soul. From the college-aged youth living in a co-op house in town to the secluded culture of people living in the hollers – people create the divergent and funky soul of this place.
• Freezin’ for a Reason. Annually, members of the Ohio University and Athens communities shiver together to brave the near-freezing conditions of Dow Lake at Strouds Run State Park. Their “plunge” raises money for the Special Olympics of Ohio.
• Anointed Praise. For the 25 Ohio University students who form the choral group Anointed Praise, gospel music provides a connection to God, to the Athens community and to each other.
• Hip Hop Congress. Appalachian Ohio seems an unlikely place to find elements of hip hop. But at Ohio University, the Hip Hop Congress promotes the culture in a way that adds to the richness and diversity of the Athens community.

Thanks to the Times Higher Education, which is publicising our site alongside the rankings, and to Automattic, who have donated WordPress.com VIP hosting to the University Lives Collection. Their great solutions have made this launch very smooth. We also welcome our most recent partner, Magnatune.com. Magnatune is helping us respect both copyright and creativity by offering numerous albums free as soundtrack resources for student videos submitted to the University Lives Collection.

More information about sponsoring or partnering with the University Lives Collection is available on the sponsors page.

This is a photo essay submitted by one of our friends, Pinar Kuzlu, an exchange student who has studied in both the USA and in Turkey. Her slideshow compares experiences in each of the universities where she has studied as an undergraduate. When UniLives.com opens for contributions in November, you can tell your story as well.  Like Pinar, you might share examples of how your education affects your lifestyle and how that lifestlye colours your experience of education. (view slideshow) (flickr set) (to see Pinar’s commentary, click “show info” on the top right)

This photograph is of me – Joshua Guy Blanchard Lewis (second from right) – with a group of medical students from the specialist science and medicine university Omar Mukhtar, near Al Bayda in Libya. I visited Libya last March with a team of students and camera crew from Cambridge University, Anglia Ruskin University and the World University Project. We toured various universities and faculties and experienced higher education life across the country.

Undergraduate education in Libya is free, while students are offered free accommodation at their campus to encourage them to live on-site. Nonetheless, strong family ties lead many students to remain at home – often to enjoy their mother’s cooking! The students in this picture had a great deal of pride in their facilities, which boasted top-notch new machinery.  However, their library was significantly smaller than other universities in Libya, perhaps because of the focus on hands-on learning and long hours in the wards.

When we drew comparisons with the U.K. education system, which we are most familiar with, we were surprised at the determination of many students to remain at home with their parents, as with us living away from home is an integral part of the university experience! Similarly, our focus on wider reading and library work was noticeably different when compared to the Libyan system.  It is cultural variations such as these which we are seeking to explore and share through the University Lives Collection.