..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!
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.”
It seemed somehow necessary to note today’s important remembrance. It was of course Bastion Point ‘day’. Thirty years! Thirty years!
It was great to watch Maori TV last night (the only media apart from some news items in mainstream today) and the unravellings of the stories. Merata Mita’s great documentary, and people telling their stories made for intriguing and compulsive viewing. They certainly do it ‘good’ on Maori TV!
It’s interesting to ask ourselves how much have we all changed? Is there a difference? Most would say ‘yes’ it’s better but there are still disturbing stories of alienation, violence and its partner poverty.
Hmm we seem to be taking a break. One break was at a school reunion. Now there’s a place for stories. Who are those people? How come they look so old? How come they don’t know me? Am I looking that old too? While it’s great to catch up, ya gotta admit that the best stories are the ones that make us laugh and relate details of teenage angst. Gosh! was all that going on too? How intense are our teenage years.
Barnaby Haszard Morris’s blog Jdanspa Wyksui provides some thought about images and how he feels about them. Worth a read.
Kiwi Educators in SL are planning a storytelling circle (yet to be clearly defined) to mark May 16th -International Life Storytelling Day. Should have collected stories at the reunion!
OK- we all know that lyrics set to music are the most common stories that we tell. And we all know that we read books then get disappointed when we see the film - That’s not how I imagined it.
This video of Antony and the Johnsons tells a story that for me, linked into the stories of men who try to overcome violence. I have listened to this many times and thought that it was about unrequited love, and that it’s also about staying in a violent relationship.
But it’s all open to interpretation - as the comments on this vid of Fistful of Love attest.
We guess that’s why digital storytelling is so great - you get to write your own script and show your own images.
Merry Christmas! As we celebrate the birth of one of the greatest storytellers it seems appropriate to link to some seasonal silliness: How the finch stole e-learning. A fun animated tale in which the finch learns that e-Learning’s “more than computers and mice”, it’s “…a story told with instructional design”. Certainly brings a smile to our beaks!
Celia Lashlie is passionate about the stories of adolescent boys. She has visited New Zealand secondary school classrooms and listened to boys tell their stories. The essence of those stories she has distilled in her book He’ll be OK: Growing Gorgeous Boys Into Good Men. Now she has gone back to school, but this time speaking to parents.
Celia asserts that the only acceptable emotion many New Zealand males feel able to express is anger, however if we hope to grow good men, as Celia is fond of saying, then we need to help those young men become more emotionally confident. Celia defines an emotionally confident boy as one who can “ask and answer reflective questions”.
Questions like: “When have you felt scared?” and “When have you felt alone?”. How do we answer these complex questions? We answer them by telling stories. And how will today’s generation of young men, who use an economy of words, tell these stories? In the medium with which they are most familiar—yes, I’m talking about digital storytelling!
And fathers, Celia also challenges us to step up and make time for our sons and time to share our story, because:
If men can begin to share these stories with their sons, with other men and perhaps even with their wives and partners, and if we can honour those stories within our society as they deserve to be honoured, we’ll be taking a significant step forward in guiding our young men successfully across the bridge of adolescence into manhood.
Father and son digital storytelling workshop anyone?
We haven’t written much for a while, which doesn’t mean we haven’t been doing anything….some Storyboards ’stuff’ bubbling away and some other ’stuff’ done wearing different hats, like a workshop at EIT and sorting out some process, some presentations at e-fest later this year and a paper or two about stories being written.
But this has become more informal and friends’ll have it RSS fed, so it’s a chance to mull over a great night in Wellington. What a charmer Chic Corea turned out to be. And yep. He told stories. He started to tell us stories about Monk but stopped. But he did tell us about his reverence for Monk and Ellington through his playing, and he told us about his grandchildren and the pieces he’d created about children. He told us about his love for his father when he played a piece from the 1940s then took us back to Monk again via Bill Evans. A fair sprinkling of Corea in there too. It was a pleasant, warm and at times very groovy evening. Nothing much digital but some great stories.
And so. Perhaps we’ll get back to more musings. Soon.
Heartwarming to visit and warm the NewDowse. It looks good and there’s enough for those of us who like comfort (gift exchange, New Zealand craft, Preston, Adam, Freeman, Frances H, McCahon and Harris) and some stuff to startle and excite (Droog, Domestic Futurists). Nuku Tewhatewha looks fabulous, the story of the 8 pou of Kingitanga enticing, and the surrounding leadership stories inspiring. There were other stories alluded to too, when Judith Tizzard in her opening remarks told how the late weaver, Erenora Puketapu-Hetet told her that the way for us all to live together was for us to know and share the stories of our ancestors. There’s much could be done in that vein. You might find some here and of course here.
We’ll share any that we find with you.
And on the radio Chris Laidlaw’s interview with Dr Vincent Felitti who talked about the ways abuse in childhood impacts on our addictions in later life. We need to find ways to share those stories. Maybe this on the Media Rights site can help. Cynthia Lehman says she is making a digital story about her own abuse experiences.
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