http://elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=articles&article=120-1

A wee article about the value of digital storytelling. We knew this!

..since we wrote anything. Social networking sites seem to have taken our interest. Or perhaps real world have intervened.

But! Last year we did run a hugely successful workshop in Hamilton. A small group of Pasifika and Maori teenagers joined us for a workshop on digital stories. Many of the stories were emotionally moving and the final showntell event was attended by families and friends, as well as Maori tv. We can’t really show you any stories because we did not seek permission to show them, and besides they’ll be shown by the Hamilton City Council staff who organised the week-long event. But one of us did get to portray a racist school teacher…..

Another workshop is planned for this year. Meantime one of us is collecting stories of locals who have lived in the Porirua area for a while. A kind of mission of love, and also preparing to co-present a paper on distributed identities at the DEANZ Conference in Wellington at the end of April. The other of us has moved daytime jobs to the University of Waikato!

Helen Barrett’s discovered some interesting research directed by John Sanders at Leeds University. Reflect 2.0 is case study research into reflective practice and digital storytelling across disciplines, building on the work of Jenkins & Lonsdale.

The researchers ask that those that are interested join them in the i reflect community where you can find resources, watch stories, and contribute to the community forums.

OK so I’m thinking about learning environments but this book looks pretty cool and no Shelfari is not working for me.

Technology-Mediated Narrative Environments for Learning (Hardcover)
by G Dettori (Editor), T Giannetti (Editor)

http://books.google.co.nz/books?id=HNDMY5YwCPkC&dq=learning+environments&printsec=frontcover&source=in&hl=en&ei=We7CSbv5GpKWsQP4p8T-Bg&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=10&ct=result#PPP1,M1

I liked this too:

http://internationaldayblog.storycenter.org/

The theme this year for May16th is Immigrant and Human Rights.

While last year we were part of team that set up the local Ning site Digital Life Stories I am not convinced that this year we will have the wherewithall to do anything. We had hoped that others would contribute to the Ning site and they have but it has alas lapsed a little. If you have a story you want to add there…. add it!

Let us know if you want to do something and we will do our best to support and be involved.

With today’s launch of DigitalNZ New Zealand’s digital content just got much easier to “find, share and use”. A quick Coming Home search for Frank Clark returns Trooper Frank Clark’s Cenotaph Database record including a link to the digital story we created!
More exciting though is Auckland War Memorial Museum’s hosting of Memory Maker, a web-based video editor based on ideum’s EditorOne. Memory Maker lets you remix selected digitized content from National Digital Forum members (and others) to produce your own video. Not quite a digital storytelling machine, but a promising start.

We are both very pleased to be asked to sit on the technology panel at the New Zealand Communications Conference in Hamilton this year. We’ll be talking about Web 2.0 and applications for teaching and learning.

And talking of Web 2.0 and related matters….I guess we’ve all caught up with the story about divorce, prostitution in SL and the interface with reality. Interesting times and a story that has provoked many a discussion about multiple identities the nature of marriage and reality. If we had time we’d love to start our PHD about the nature of identity and the web. But we won’t. Yet.

If you’ve arrived here after attending the e-engage your community conference in Wellington we hope you found our digital storytelling workshop useful. Feel free to leave any feedback here. Don’t forget to visit the digital storytelling course and we look forward to you sharing your stories with us.

After kicking off another digital storytelling workshop last night the participants left inspired, but tempered by the realisation that telling their story in 250 words may not be a simple task. So it seemed appropriate that I should share this Mark Twain quote:

“I didn’t have the time to write
a short letter,
so I wrote a long one instead.”

The quote begins Rajesh Setty’s ChangeThis manifesto on mini sagas, stories told in exactly 50 words. As Daniel Meadows is fond of saying “contraints define the form…” I’m reminded of Hemmingway’s haunting six word story: For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

This link will take you to a website called Ethnic Communities that talks about elements of cross cultural communication.

Check out the digital stories to see what great stories people developed in one of our workshops.