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Held at the offices of Yorkville Media Centre (YMC) is going where few seldom dare: helping people learn about Digital Media at no cost.

The YMC is in its fourth season, and one of the most frequent ‘wishes’ of the people that have come out and participated in the YMC sessions has been for more content that they could access outside of the physical YMC location. As a result, YMC has partnered with Microsoft and The Biz Media to produce some reference videos. 

I spoke with YMC class instructor Mark Reale about YMC and their new partners:

Mark, I see you’ve got some new things in store for this season’s YMC.This season we have had the opportunity to partner with The Biz Media to help get some YMC videos produced that both in-class participants can use for reference, and people who aren’t able to make it to the sessions can use as an overview of the topics covered, and understand the context in which they can put various software programs to use in developing websites. What sort of things is YMC covering this season? The topic material covered this season is the same deal the YMC has been implementing since day 1 – a focus on Open Source software and encouraging people outside the Digital Media industry to get their hands dirty and embrace these technologies for their own personal projects. For those who are unfamiliar with what is covered at YMC, what sort of things can attendees expect to learn? We discuss a ton of hardware and software technologies over the course of the 9 sessions, including the Open Source code editors such as Notepad++, and jEdit, graphics programs such as GIMP and Inkscape, full production suites such as those available from Microsoft and Adobe, all culminating in a fully customized and content managed website powered on WordPress. Wow!  That sounds like a lot.  I understand you also have guest speakers come in? The YMC welcomes guest speakers from various areas in the industry to come in and talk with participants for an hour and fill in some of the blanks that the YMC doesn’t cover – areas such as Video, Content Production, Gaming, Security, Entrepreneurship, the Mobile space amongst others.