YouToo: Writing Centers and Media Outreach

   A large part of my internship for this semester is an attempt to keep our MSU Writing Center's media outreach current, as well as aesthetic. Being a double major in Photography and Writing at Montana State has helped immensely -- to say that I have experience with iMovie, Photoshop, and Microsoft Word's Publishing Layouts would be an understatement. However, a challenge I never anticipated was the amount of time and effort needed to promote a space like the MSU Writing Center.

   Our writing center helps so many students on campus that our outreach needs to be as diverse as the writers walking in our door. We've expanded immensely on social media in the last two years, with a Facebook, Twitter, and Blogger. During that time period, we pushed our Blogger aside after realizing that our audience consisted of our peer tutors, and no one else. Facebook and Twitter may not have reached the number of students we initially hoped for, but has come to be our primary campus networking.

   A newsletter (as shown in the image above) was started the semester before I came to the writing center, starting as a double-sided piece of paper, whose primary audience was yet again the tutors in our space. We began pushing our idea of audience, extending our next issue to reach across campus. This semester, our issue has been posted on our website, and the circulation around campus has increased yet again.

   These forms of outreach -- both social media and the newsletter -- are not unique to our writing center. We understood this from the beginning, and used other writing centers across the country to base our platform on, gaining inspiration from their successes (as well as failures). But, we wanted our space to be unique -- to use media outreach in a way that would demonstrate our uniqueness, as well as attract writers from parts of campus that we hadn't yet broken into. So, we've gone film-crazed.

   The most exciting part of our outreach (for me) has been the development of our video outreach. Last semester, I created a marketing video that was initially created as an assignment for my Digital Rhetorics course. After its success in multiple facets, our director, Dr. Michelle Miley, asked me to continue developing videos as part of this internship.

   I quickly realized that this would be the most time-consuming part of my internship. Video-editing is something I'm proficient in, but not fluent. It's takes ridiculous amounts of time, and is often more frustrating than satisfying. However, the end product is incredibly successful, especially in a context such as this. The next part of our efforts, however, came in realizing that we needed a new way to display our videos to our intended audience.

   Because of this, our technology crew has begun developing a YouTube channel for our writing center. Our hopes for this platform are that it will serve as a space for our videos to be launched, but also that we could use it to share educational resources for our writers and writing center community. By sharing other institution's work, we will not only expand our audience, but also gain useful insight into how our videos can continue to evolve.

   I guess this means that the iMovie application on my work computer needs to become my primary attention, and that the video camera I have needs to turn on more often... I'm excited to get started on this part of my internship, and look forward to sharing my creations with my readership here, as well as our YouTube community. Oh, the possibilities!

   Now, for brainstorming...