Day 30 of 1000

Kelly’s education plan has started to solidify.  The end goal is to get into the best Journalism Masters Degree program possible.  Her planned undergraduate degree is Statistics, so that means she will have to work pretty hard to get some Journalism experience if she wants to make the jump from hard science/math to a social science.  She wants to go to the World Journalism Institute as part of that plan.  The program is called Convergence Course:  Backpack Journalism in a Digital Age.  The thing that is cool about it is that it covers a bunch of different types of media that requires a bunch of different types of technology.  There is a whole web page that describes what is required. 

You can see the required list of equipment and software if you click on the “Required hardware/software” tab of the course webpage.  I do not want to steal her thunder so I will let her describe what she is doing over on her blog when she gets to it.

The reason I brought all this up is that have been forced into buying some cool new technology that I could in no other way justify.  We decided to purchase some of the stuff now, so she could start practicing.  There is a bunch of software, a lot of which we already have, but there are two fairly big hardware items other than the computer that we felt like she could use to help her prepare some of the materials required to get accepted into the class.  They turned out to be way neater than I expected.  The first is a professional reporters portable voice recorder.  We got one of the ones they recommended which is shown to the left.  It is called a Zoom H2 and has more features than I would have thought possible for a simple voice recorder.

The other item is a portable video camera that is just as cool.  It is the Aiptek A-HD+ 1080P Digital Camcorder pictured at the right.  We have enough software to get her going with these two devices, but she will need to buy more if she gets into the course.  All of these devices require SD cards so I bought one additional 8GB card, but I think I am going to buy one or two more after that.  We thought it would be a great idea for her to have them now so she could practice with them for a few months and generate the blog posts she needs to even be able to apply for the program.

I think I am more excited than Kelly.  I hope she lets me play with this stuff a little.