A New Direction: Multimedia Classes!

I just had an epiphany.

I'm not enjoying my online life much right now. I just quit my job, so I'm fearing my financial prospects right now. And I just moved into a bigger place, yet I'm not utilizing the full potential of my killer home theater/studio/lecture room right now. Yet I enjoy teaching, have some pretty advanced technical skills, and have a venue of hundreds (thousands?) of readers.

What to do? Synergize.

So – I'm gathering a class of "the interested" who would like to break into multimedia without the hair-pulling of doing it yourself from the ground up. I've always gotten a trickles of emails asking whether I taught photography, or podcast production, or the even the details of website production; as once upon a time, I designed web sites from scratch, back before the days of the "blog" (the only thing I haven't figured out is Cascading Style Sheets).

What this boils down to is a single, 8-week class covering primarily three things:

1. Photography (3 weeks)– covering the basics of shutter/aperture/depth-of-field, composition, and the strategies of street shooting. How do you get in close? When is the decisive moment? What are the kinds of shots I should be thinking of getting? How do I choose the proper equipment to grab the shots I want? For those of you who need to take better pictures for some reason, this is gonna clean your stuff right up.

2. Podcast Production (3 weeks) – While my podcast is far from perfect, technically it is well-produced. You need to know the basics of sound production before even getting to the relatively simple technical details of getting a podcast up; for those of you without a few hundred dollars to spend, however, I can help you get the most out of the equipment you have or can afford. Then we get to sound editing, encoding properly, RSS feeds, buying the right kind of server space, choosing the right kind of programs, etc. Actually, from beginning to end, producing a good podcast can be quite a chore. Then there's video production and video podcasts. Whew! I walk you through it.

3. Blogging (2 weeks) – This helps you put all these together. Of course, anyone can get a blog up on Blogger.com or even a Wordpress blog, but what about purchasing URL's, choosing the right platform for what you want to do, hosting your own Wordpress blog, or even getting into the Joomla Content Management System, which is where you need to get to if you want to do anything really grand. I spent a couple months, as a pretty server/tech savvy guy tearing my hair out learning Joomla. It's actually not that hard once you get to it – but doing it yourself was Hell. I'll walk you through everything from Blogger to Typepad to Wordpress to Joomla – in about that order of difficulty – and help you get the basics to create a blog as successful as you want it to be.

By the end, you'll have all the skills you need to have good photography, a solid audio or video podcast, and a well-chosen blog to link them all together. In eight week, if you want, you can go from having no online presence to being an online force to be reckoned with. If you want.

So – I'm looking for 5 people to meet once a week for a 3-hour seminar/workshop for 8 weeks. I got the space, secure wireless internet for everybody, an projector w/80-inch screen to show computer stuff, and more electronic equipment than a Star Trek convention. So bring your laptop, your equipment, and your own skillset so we can combine forces and get you into tip-top shape. And if you actually like the site, we get to work together for 2 months and you can learn that I'm really not a crazy person. I'm actually pretty nice.

Here's the space itself, still under construction because of my recent move (last week):

I don't know how many people will be interested – maybe there'll be a flood, maybe I'll be hearing crickets. But I thought it worth a shot – trying to put together my skills, desire to teach, and helping support other people who want to get their voices heard – to combine with my need to keep the bills paid. Who doesn't relish the possibility of doing something they love and meeting cool people while doing it? To me, it's more socially useful and personally fulfilling than evne the juiciest of tutoring jobs.

So for the price of a month's beer money, if you want to put your heads together with others and my own and produce something, while helping a po' Metropolitician out, then let's shoot, record, edit, and publish together! 5-6 people's the limit, because then it just gets unwieldy after that. 

Email me directly (kuraeji[at]gmail.com) – or by clicking the link at the upper right of the page – and we'll get the gritty details out of the way and start scheduling together. In your email, please include your phone number, by the way. Email tag sucks and I'm not good at it.

This seems like a good way to be involved with blogging while not actually blogging, even though I'm technically blogging right now. Whew. Anyway, this will be a great change of pace. I look forward to your inquiries!

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