KQED offers free storytelling workshops

Longtime readers know I'm a huge fan of digital storytelling. We all have stories to tell, about our lives, our friends, our communities.

The KQED Digital Media Center is putting on a series of free digital storytelling workshops over the next few weeks. Says KQED's Leslie Rule:

We've revised our workshop schedule, streamlining our traditional digital storytelling workshop and expanding our offerings by developing a place-based digital storytelling workshop using geo-apps like Google Earth and Google Maps. We also offer a train-the-trainers workshop.

Sessions will be held Feb. 5, 7, 26, 28, March 5, 7, 12, 14 and 21 at KQED in San Francisco, sponsored by Youth Voices. Download the application here.

January 27, 2009 at 01:20 AM in Digital storytelling | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Voices: Community stories in Tucson

Speaking of Woices, here's a snippet from the latest NAMAC newsletter about Voices:

VOICES offers young people in Tucson [Arizona] a safe space, positive relationships, and the skills training to document real-life stories. Youth who are creative, resilient, educated, and active citizens are youth who benefit themselves, their families, and our community now and in the future. Through our print and online publications, radio broadcasts, and digital stories we provide the platform for youth to share their work and transform the world around them. At VOICES, we believe stories are an agent of change.

Founded in 1999, VOICES brings together low-income youth to create and publish their perspectives on community issues they identify as critical. ...

November 13, 2008 at 12:38 AM in Digital storytelling, Youth culture | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Woices: a new oral information tool for travelers

David Ciudad Rodriguez passes along word of a new site from Spain (I think) called Woices. It's a free internet service that allows people to create, share and consume "echoes": audio records that are linked to a very specific geographical location or real world object.

Rodriguez says Woices's ultimate goal is "to create a new layer of oral information, what we call the echoesphere, that will make the world a more interesting place. Woices tries to extract all those histories and pieces of information that is not possible to find in the tourist guides."

November 13, 2008 at 12:05 AM in Digital storytelling, Travel | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Keeping the storytelling tradition alive

Associated Press: StoryCorps: Ordinary folks telling tales a big hit. Excerpt:

Patsy Lawson and her husband, Herman, grew up in a patch of Appalachia with "no railroad, no airstrips, just subsistence farming." There she learned from her father—a "great natural storyteller"—how to turn everyday events into compelling tales.

Now Lawson is helping ensure that same art is passed along to the next generation: She was among hundreds who visited a recording booth set up in Nashville by StoryCorps, a nonprofit project that records the stories of ordinary people and archives them at the Library of Congress.

And she is teaching people to develop personal stories from real life as a member of the National Storytelling Network. ...

Looking forward to hearing abou the StoryBooth's visit to SF.

October 3, 2008 at 01:17 AM in Digital storytelling | Permalink | Comments (1) | | (0)

Singapore International Storytelling Festival

Wish I could be at the Singapore International Storytelling Festival (perhaps they'll invite me one year). Events begin this week, and Denise Atchley and Leslie Rule, whom I met up with again at a digital storytelling event at KQED on Saturday, fly out later this week to give a Bootcamp on Digital Storytelling at the Toa Payoh Community Library. Here's the impressive list of storytellers who'll be on hand.

August 26, 2008 at 02:06 PM in Digital storytelling | Permalink | Comments (1) | | (0)

Has the Internet failed as a storytelling medium?

Advertising Age: Has the Internet Failed as a Storytelling Medium? There's Hope, Thanks to Three Emerging Tactics.

July 11, 2008 at 12:00 AM in Digital storytelling | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Storycircles.org: a home for your stories

The Center for Digital Storytelling has just announced the pre-launch of its new nonprofit online video sharing site, StoryCircles. You're invited to use this new place for sharing videos online for digital stories. From the site's announcement:

We have built this online video sharing environment specifically made for the digital storytelling community. We realize not every storyteller wants their story shared to the world. With this in mind, we have created a site with the unique feature that registered users can set each of their stories at any one of four privacy settings — one allowing a story to be seen by anyone visiting the site, one that is shared only with other registered users on the site, one shared only within friends designated by the story's creator, and one that can only be seen by the creator themselves.

More importantly, unlike YouTube and other commercial video sharing sites, you do NOT sign away any rights to your story when you upload it. Your story, how it is shared, and how you share rights, is up to you.

We envision the site as a resource and meeting grounds for everyone from seasoned digital storytelling instructors to workshop participants to those simply interested in the work we do to a general public. The site allows you to organize as many groups as you want, and share movies only within the group that you manage. People can make small story circles around a few stories, copy and paste the url location into emails and blogs to share with others. You can embed the Flash-based files, and the site will accept files from wmv, quicktime and mpeg formats.

That's very exciting. I've been trying to get digital storytellers to upload their stories to Ourmedia, with only modest success, for years, so I'll be following the Storycenter's progress with great interest.

May 25, 2008 at 02:45 AM in Digital storytelling | Permalink | Comments (1) | | (0)

Unconference on digital media

KQED is sponsoring the Un-Conference on Digital Media, Education and 21st Century Skills with Lightning Talks.

When: Saturday, May 17, 10 am to 3 pm

Where: KQED, 2601 Mariposa, San Francisco                

Why: Share something you know or have done, and learn something you didn’t or haven’t.

What it is: An unconference, where the content of the sessions is driven and created by the participants. Come and discuss what you know, or would like to know about new media, education, and 21st century skills.

Details: Lightning talks, short presentations given at a conference (or un-conference) by attendees. Lightning talks last only 7 minutes, allowing several to be delivered in a single period by different speakers. We encourage you to present your work, and come on up to the podium! Send requests to lrule at kqed.org

Agenda: Morning: Welcome and Opening Statement; Introduction and Interests; Lightning talks

Lunch provided. Afternoon hands-on sessions: Google Earth training (bring a digital picture of a place you love); Mobile Devices, storytelling, and place-based learning (you’ll walk the neighborhood) or suggest your own topic and lead a tutorial or discussion. Call with questions: 415-553-2192              

Also: Friday evening (May 16, 6:30-8:30 at KQED) as we celebrate our local high school digital storytellers who participated in the KQED’s 6th Annual Digital Storytelling Contest. Stories will be screened and fabulous prizes awarded.

May 7, 2008 at 12:52 AM in Digital culture, Digital storytelling | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

A visit to the Storycenter

Spent part of the evening at the Center for Digital Storytelling. Great to reconnect with Joe Lambert and see the talented group of trainers who'll be holding digital storytelling workshops around the U.S. and in Canada. I'm looking forward to May 16, when the Center and Brazil's Museum of the Person will co-sponsor an International Day for Sharing Life Stories.

November 16, 2007 at 12:20 AM in Digital storytelling | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Young digital storytellers

The San Francisco Chronicle on 10- and 11-year-old digital storytellers. Excerpt:

A sampling of the results were projected on a screen Saturday and are available for viewing at MoAD's [Museum of the African Diaspora] Web site. Each student was recorded telling a story about a family member, which plays over a photo of that family member. Their voices sometimes stumble, but the material is funny and touching, and the details often surprise. Delilah Sagote, 10, talks about her Samoan grandmother growing up playing basketball and going to church with her brothers and sisters. Isaiah Tenes, 10, discusses his great-grandmother's struggles as a young person, saying, "Her mom was born in Europe during the war. She had three other sisters. She said: 'They would be lucky if they made it to school.' There were bombs falling and gunfire all the time. They would have to hide in bomb shelters. It was underground and very scary."

The students learned how to compose pictures. Tenes' mother is posed in a chair holding a photo of her mother in much the same outfit and position. The angle of the picture of Sagote's beaming grandmother is from below, underscoring the point that these kids managed to capture the world as they saw it.

Each student took more than 300 photos, so the handful displayed on the Web site are the result of a lot of editing. Common themes seem to be cars and friends, although the students were also taught to look for interesting lines and forms - which makes for intriguing visions of the urban landscape. ...

August 30, 2007 at 11:55 PM in Digital storytelling | Permalink | Comments (0)

Zadi Diaz on video storytelling

I spent some time last week with Zadi Diaz, one of the organizers of the firstl Pixelodeon festival in Hollywood. Zadi's one of the coolest people I know in the videoblogging world -- high-energy, bursting with dazzling ideas and super nice.

Says Zadi: "This is a new language. People are telling their stories with their cameras." Here's a 9-minute video interview of her discussing her popular JetSet Internet TV show, Pixelodeon, and the revolution in video storytelling.

Ourmedia page | watch video in MPEG4 (29MB)
Blip page | watch video in Flash

June 19, 2007 at 03:25 PM in Digital storytelling, Video | Permalink | Comments (2) | | (0)

2nd digital storytelling festival in UK

Daniel Meadows announces the second DS Cymru Digital Storytelling Festival to be held June 21 at Aberystwyth Arts Centre in Wales, UK. Says Daniel: "DS 2 aims to inspire, encourage, and show the exciting possibilities of Digital Storytelling whether you work in education, the community or as an artist."

May 5, 2007 at 12:29 AM in Digital storytelling | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

At the Digital Storytelling Unconference

Spent the day in San Francisco at the Digital Storytelling Unconference, a workshop put on by the Bay Area Video Coalition and the Community Technology Foundation of California. About 80 reprentatives of community-based organizations spent the day here to here presentations from me (giving a 20-minute talk about Ourmedia), Stewart Chiefet of the Internet Archive and an exec of Current TV talk about how to use the new digital technologies.

The 3-year-old Digital Storytelling Institute announced winners of its digital storytelling awards contest:

• Overcoming Adversity (Neidi's Story) by IDEPSCA

• La Clinica de la Raza (The Men of Casa C.H.E.) by Grupo de Hombres

• Recognitions of Place, by Southern California Library

• Teacher Warrior: A Cancer Survivor Story, by Bay Area Young Survivors

• Jenny's Story, by Riverside Arts Council

• Stereotypes, Youth Together

I hope we'll see some of these works posted to Ourmedia. (We'll showcase them on the front page, if so.)

April 2, 2007 at 08:58 PM in Digital storytelling | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Mapping and Web 2.0 mash-ups

Last night I guest-lectured at the Programming in Journalism class taught by Bill Gannon and Dan Gillmor at the University of California, Berkeley. We tackled the latest wrinkle in mash-up culture: Web 2.0 mash-ups that take two datasets and bring them together to create something useful or interesting.

I suggested that this will become an increasingly common form of service journalism in the years ahead, and readers will expect their local news publications to provide information that they can move through in this way. For example, if I'm looking to move to a new town, I'd love to see a mash-up that shows schools and their students' test scores plotted on a geographic map.

Some of the sites we looked at:

• HousingMaps.com, which started it all.

• Platial, a cool map-sharing service that the students are using

• NewsMap

• Chicagocrime.org

• Google Maps mash-ups (over 200 examples)

• Washington Post Remix center (inactive since last May)

• Dave McClure's list of mash-up links

• Programmable Web Mashup Dashboard

Meantime, also check out StoryMapping, a project of Joe Lambert and his colleagues at The Center for Digital Storytelling. They are developing a series of national projects for organizing digital story projects based on the link between narrative and place.

StoryMapping is a call to action. We are taking the lessons learned from more than a decade of work in Digital Storytelling, and integrating it with an emergent tool set of digital mapping technologies now available to the broad public.

Whether it is geo-tagging images on Flickr, building story-based GoogleMaps, developing Windows Live virtual tours, organizing local cell phone walking tours, or the permanent imbedding stories into locations to be received by Bluetooth and other wireless information, we can now create maps that share stories about the places that matter to us, and place our life stories in countless geographic contexts. ...

Starting this summer, we will begin a youth program with a focus on Storymapping. The Storymapping Summer Camp is open to all youth ages 12-17.

February 2, 2007 at 12:34 PM in Digital storytelling, New media | Permalink | Comments (2) | | (0)

Digital storytelling revival project

Joe Lambert at the Center for Digital Storytelling passes along this word:

Revive the Archive Project

CDS sits on a mountain of stories. Stories about first kisses, fish dinners, fabulous friends, and forgotten photographs. Stories that touch on every part of what it means to be human. Our archive spans 14 years, and some 4,000 movies.

CDS would like your support for the CDS Revive the Archive Project. With your help, we will be able to revisit stories from our workshops in the past, and produce them as public pieces for the world to share. 

Over our history, many of the stories created in our three day workshop process have been intended principally for the private sharing of the maker and her/his immediate community. It was not realistic, or necessarily preferable, for us to make the work available for broad distribution.

In 2007, with your generous help, we will select a group of stories and invite the makers to join us in a special production process. We will interview the makers in studio, re-work their stories to address any concerns for public presentation, and create a broadcast quality DVD featuring the makers and their stories. These stories will also be presented on our website.

For every $1,000 we raise we can complete another story. Our goal for 2007 is 25 stories. To find out how to contribute, go to http://www.storycenter.org/archive.


November 1, 2006 at 10:54 PM in Digital storytelling | Permalink | Comments (0)

Joe Lambert on digital storytelling

I had put off posting this interview I conducted with Joe Lambert, co-founder of the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley, Calif., a while back because it's the most poorly lit interview I've ever done (which is a shame, because the twilight light was amazing just an hour earlier).

But I've long admired Joe, and he always has wise things to say about the digital storytelling movement, as in this 5-minute cilp.  (Ourmedia page | watch video)

Cross-posted to the Real People Network

July 23, 2006 at 06:20 PM in Citizen media, Digital storytelling, Podcasts & interviews | Permalink | Comments (0)

New family oral history site

My brilliant and charming friend, Susan Kitchens, has launched a new site.

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools is a site devoted to family stories -– recording them, transferring them to your computer, and creating digital archive disks. It includes how-tos, tools and techniques.

Susan and I have been discussing oral storytelling over the past year. Glad that Ourmedia and the Internet Archive could help her offer an accompanying podcast. I'm hoping Susan will head up the Ourmedia Learning Center's section on oral histories.

March 26, 2006 at 01:35 AM in Digital storytelling | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Ashes and snow

Ashes and snow, in Flash. Nice.

February 4, 2006 at 03:19 PM in Digital storytelling | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

International Digital Storytelling Conference

My friends Joe Lambert of the Center for Digital Storytelling, Daniel Meadows of Capture Wales and Karen Worcman of Brazil's Museum of the Person (she's on Ourmedia's Board of Advisors) are all attending the three-day International Digital Storytelling Conference, which begins today in Melbourne, Australia. Writes Joe:

As a follow-up to the 2003 BBC Digital Storytelling Conference, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image is hosting a gathering to “investigate the power of personal narrative as a way to explore issues of social justice, community building and social memory.” Speakers from Latin America, Asia, Europe, North America and the Asian Pacific region will share their work and experiences in the field of narrative and new media. John O’Neal, civil rights activist, theater performer, and writer, will give the keynote address. As a long time resident of New Orleans, he will talk about the role of artists as citizens, both from a historical and broad social perspective, as well as in light of the Katrina disaster and his community. After the conference, Amy Hill will lead a workshop for survivors of violence, related to her work with Silence Speaks, and Joe will co-lead a master’s workshop with ACMI’s Helen Simondson.

Wish I could be there. Maybe next year.

February 3, 2006 at 12:31 AM in Digital storytelling | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Community through storytelling

Last month at the Digital Storytelling Festival in San Francisco I met an amazing woman, Jennifer Myronuck, who has been plugged into the local community media scene for some time. This week she is launching a new project, Storyfield, whose goal is to make it easier to help oral historians chronicle the lives of people in their communities. We are, after all, the stories we tell.

Here's a seven-minute video interview of Jennifer talking about community storytelling. (see Ourmedia page | watch video, a 30MB MPEG-4 file)

Technorati tags: storytelling 

November 3, 2005 at 04:40 PM in Digital storytelling, Podcasts & interviews, Video | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Daniel Meadows on the power of storytelling

I cornered Daniel Meadows, one of the icons of the digital storytelling movement, a week ago at the Digital Storytelling Festival at KQED in San Francisco. Daniel talks about his personal journey from journalism ("doing media to others") to storytelling ("enabling people to tell their own stories").

If you're wondering what digital storytelling is all about, you can do no better than checking out Daniel's homemade stories at his photobus.co.uk personal site and at the BBC's Capture Wales site.

Here's the 9-minute video (30 MB in MPEG-4 -- sorry for the size but I hate crappy quality). (Ourmedia page | watch video)

Technorati tags: digital storytelling,  Daniel Meadows, BBC, Wales, HonorTagJournalism

October 16, 2005 at 12:55 AM in Digital storytelling, Podcasts & interviews, Video | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)