Final session with our citizen journalist team from City of Bristol College and David Goldblatt today - they came to Cinema 3 at Watershed so we could look at the blogs on the big screen together and discuss the work they'd uploaded - the photos, videos and audio interviews and a few text posts. Mobile phone cameras might have some limitations but they managed to capture some great still and moving images, and some intriguing atmospheric audio and interviews.

We always aim to get feedback from participants we work with at Watershed so we can develop and refine our projects; as this is still only our third venture into citizen journalism it's especially important. Joining us for the session with their own research questions were RELAYS colleague Matthew Swindells from UWE and our project  collaborator (and phone-loaner!) Dr Emma Rich from Bath University

We got some really useful responses from our students at this session that included practical concerns (like the frustrations of typing more than a few words on a touch-screen keypad and the difficulties of photographing high speed cyclists on a gloomy path in the woods) to valuable suggestions about the structure of the training sessions  - such as having more hands-on time with the phones before going live with the blogging, and being shown more examples of blogs for reference at the start of the project. Many felt they'd been 'thrown in at the deep-end' - a good place to start as a potential journalist maintains David Goldblatt (who should know!) but then a number of them also said they'd learnt a lot. Of course we recognise that people do learn in different ways so we'll adapt and evolve as we move on with the project.

A good number of the students were enthusiastic about the possibility of joining us at Weymouth next year for covering the range of activities that will be going on there from July to September - from Olympic Sailing to the Battle for the Winds, we're planning the trip already!