Grahamstown review

I am sitting in the P.E. Airport waiting for my flight to board so I thought it might be a good time to reflect on the Captivate Conference that I attended in Grahamstown over the long weekend.First of all, Captivate is a national student media conference - or at least that's what it's meant to be. It was more of a student media conference for the less apathetic students. Apathy was a widely discussed topic over the weekend. Almost every speaker was approached by the student newspapers present and asked how to deal with student apathy regarding media and issues that the papers cover in their reporting.My presentation was on Saturday just after lunch and just before Carly and Gregor's Times presentation. It worked out really well in my opinion. I opened up nicely for them and touched on issues that they went in to more depth about. Unfortunately I wont be uploading the presentation on to this blog because there are some parts of the presentation that are not quite for public consumption just yet. FM Campus is relaunching its website in the next month or so and I want to do it with a bang, so the presentation can't really be shown yet.I spoke about the state of the media as I have come to know it as a young media practitioner in a big media organisation. I basically explained to the delegates that life can be very, very good as a journalist in SA and there is lots of opportunity for students moving in the media industry.Carly and Gregor presented a fun take on multimedia content at The Times and brought up issues surrounding multimedia production for students at university. Their use of The Simpsons made their presentation very accessible to students and the delegates present.Then on Sunday (with a massive headache and super-fantastic hangover) Gregor, Carly and I held a "Talkshop" (nice phrase) around convergence. This was possibly the most rewarding and interactive part of the conference. We were able to interact with people who have skills in media production but have know idea how to converge the various media options available to them. Many of the editors present had never thought of linking their print with online and blogs and vice versa on all fronts. For the three of us presenting this was very scary.We did our best to try and provide them with viable options to produce their own multimedia content for students on a student level. One of the newspapers - The Oppipress - seems to have a better grip on the whole concept than some of the others present but I think that through the Talkshop we were able to make them all realise that a cellphone camera or digital camera can make for a great tool to produce multimedia content on a very basic level.In general I must admit that I am saddened with the apathy of students in the media production market at a university level. I understand that many of them are under-funded and couldn't make the trip but many of the invited newspapers were simply not interested in attending. I can say for certain that they will be the ones falling behind very soon.Present campuses were UJ, NMMU, Rhodes, UKZN and TUKS. Those are five campuses out of a definite 12 that have student media on their campuses. Very sad. If you want to talk about apathy as a student media producer one thing is for sure, you cannot promote apathy.I think I will be posting another post about the state of Grahamstown Bed and Breakfasts. I had some pretty bad experiences at the BnB I stayed at. But nonetheless a worthwhile trip down in terms of education, experience and networking for all parties concerned.Thanks go out to the Captivate organising committee.