A number of faculty are coming to us with digital video questions, which is great. I love digital video, the students love digital video, and damn if it doesn’t tap into the secret creative nooks and crannies of a faculty member’s heart! I think most of us crave some sort of creative outlet but we rarely get that need met. Anyway, I dipped a toe into the high definition world today and bought my faculty development lab a Canon HV20. It’s a nice little HD camera according to the reviews, and doesn’t try to force me to use a memory stick or DVDs or something else equally impractical (HD miniDV tapes are still the best choice in my humble opinion, both for archiving and for reusability). It has an advanced shoe which allowed me to purchase a directional microphone for it, which will be wonderful, but I was forced to stop short of a wide-angle or telephoto lens due to my limited budget. Sigh…maybe next year. I can’t wait! All my software supports HD now (CS3 Master Suite, Premier Elements 3, iMovie, Final Cut Express). Only trouble is, we don’t have any HD screens on which to watch this stuff!

We also bought a lovely DV playback machine, since I expect we’ll be swimming in student tapes for ePortfolios this fall. Faculty from the Faculty Development Workshop are quite eager to get going on this, which I think is just fantastic.  Some days, I remember why I wanted to come here – people want to succeed and move ahead, and that makes my job so much more gratifying.