virtualDavis

StoryKit digital story app (Credit: The Tech Savvy Educator)

I got really really excited about an application I recently downloaded for the iPod Touch, and wanted to share a short preview, nothing too fancy. I’ve been coordinating my buildings efforts to pilot some iPod Touches, leading up to an eventual full classroom trial this fall, but in the meantime, we’re figuring out where these little devices might be useful in the classroom. Lots of people decry the use of the iPod since it’s primarly a consumption device, but there are some decent publication and creation applications as well, including StoryKit, a completely FREE digital story creation application! (The Tech Savvy Educator)

Ben Rimes’ video preview of StoryKit for the iPod Touch is yet another indication that digital storytelling has become mainstream, and that tools will continue to emerge that simplify the creation and sharing of digital stories. Although this app looks pretty basic, it’s user-friendly and free! I suspect that digital storytelling will be the next PowerPoint!

Read the full blog post at The Tech Savvy Educator.

Telling stories is as old as the hills, as human as compassion and love, as necessary as air, sleep and chocolate. Fast forward to the digital age! Storytellers are inheriting more magical tools and techniques every day. Sounds, still and moving visuals, interaction, sharing, accessibility… This is the world of digital storytelling. Love it or hate it, it’s here to stay! (Amplicate.com)

What’s your opinion on Digital Storytelling?

Are you familiar with Amplicate.com? It’s new to me. Always more fun to experiment than stand on the sidelines and watch, right? So I dove in! According to the mission statement on their homepage, “Amplicate collects similar opinions in one place; making them more likely to be found by people and companies.” Hmmm… Not so sure about companies, but there may be a few people out there who want to weigh in on the merits and demerits of digital storytelling. Do you think digital storytelling rocks? Or do you think digital storytelling sucks?

Image and quotation via tech4k12.blogspot.com

Digital Storytelling is the modern way to tell a story. Any story.  Storytelling is a practice that has been around for as long as man has been talking.

There are several resources available for teachers to include digital story telling in their instruction.  Microsoft has recently published the Digital Storytelling E-Book, and have also created some guides to get teachers started with Windows Live Movie Maker, and Photo Story 3, both free downloads from Windows Live.

In October, 2007 educator Alan Levine evaluated 50+ on-line tools that you can use to create your own web-based story. He used each tool to create the same story so you can evaluate the differences yourself. See all the results at his wiki http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/StoryTools

“Fears grow over oil spill disaster” (Video via youtube.com)

Is this the understatement of the year: “These guys [BP] don’t have a great record in taking care of people’s health and safety.” This comment, made by Greenpeace’s Mark Floegel about BP’s insistence that shrimpers, fishermen, etc. who wish to assist in the clean up effort must first sign a BP indemnification waiver. (Note, this quotation comes at about 2:20 in the video.)

Google is leveraging its multimodal muscle via the Crisis Response pageto help cover the oil spill, aggregating timely content and publishing updated Google Earth layers to help visualize the scope, evolution and impact of the spill.

“Google is taking a major (though low-profile) step into the realm of crowd sourcing news. Users can upload their videos of the spill or news related to the Gulf oil spill, and the videos are published to a YouTube playlist, making a video record of the disaster and what is being done on the ground to stop it.” (Mother Nature Network)

Perhaps this is the silver lining? Citizens around the world are quickly learning to contribute to the story, create history as it’s made, participate in the global dialogue that until recently was interpreted and disseminated by a few. Citizen journalism is open journalism! This shift is exciting and inspiring. The democratization of information, of news, of history. Can open government be far behind?!?!

Lake Placid, New York is rated one of America’s Prettiest Towns

101 Best Outdoor Towns co-authors Sarah Tuff Dunn and Melville both put the upstate New York town of Lake Placid on their (independently compiled) lists. Dunn says it’s the “classic Main Street, pine-speckled hills and pristine small lakes” that appeal to her, while Melville describes Lake Placid as “the closest you can get to living out West when you’re in the East. It’s got the jagged mountain backdrop surrounding an unpretentious ski village bordered by two crystal lakes.” (Forbes.com)

It comes as no surprise that Lake Placid, tucked into the heart of the Adirondacks, is featured as one of America’s Prettiest Towns along with these notorious gems:

• Annapolis, Maryland
• Aspen, Colorado
• Burlington, Vermont
• Dillon, Montana
• Guttenberg, Iowa
• Monterey, California
• Portsmouth, New Hampshire
• Santa Fe, New Mexico
• Savannah, Georgia
• Sedona, Arizona
• Rockport, Maine

Beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder, so the definition of “pretty towns” was left up to the experts: Alan Blakely (architectural photographer), Erin Anderson (residential designer), John Vander Stelt (painter), Bob Krist (photographer and host of PBS’ Restoration Stories), Sarah Tuff Dunn and Greg Melville (coauthors of 101 Best Outdoor Towns), Danno Glanz (designer at urban planning and architecture firm Calthorpe Associates), and Greg Ward (coauthor of The Rough Guide USA). The overarching criterion was that all locations balance man-made and natural beauty. Obviously Lake Placid was a shoe-in, but I suspect that there are probably many more that should have made the list. What do you consider to be America’s prettiest town?

Jacques Réda at Place des Vosges in Paris (photo via Irish Times)

[Jacques] Réda has lived in Paris since 1953, and his chronicling of the city’s landscape is one of the recurring features of his work. The French term flâneur is often applied to him, though he prefers circulation . After all, “the real flâneur is someone who has their head in the clouds, who stops everywhere, who has no objective. That’s not really my temperament,” he says. And yet Réda seems forever on the move: setting off, stopping, beginning afresh. His gaze is constantly being drawn, whether by a beautiful 19th century building, an elegant shopfront, or, as in his prose-poem The Ruins of Paris , “by a sky as incomprehensible as the approach of love”. As Jennie Feldman, a translator of his poetry, has noted, the realistic tone of Réda’s work has been credited with helping to “ground” tendencies to lyrical flightiness, and in contrast to the abstract form of expression found in much modern French poetry, there is a sharp visual instinct at work. He has said that many of his poems originated in a single stubborn image of something seen or imagined: a woman selling wool, a reflection in a puddle, a beggar on a street corner.

Réda’s vantage point is often that of a face lost in the crowd, marvelling at the ordinary or the nondescript – bottles lying in the gullies, “singing colossi of roses” or “olive trees in grand conversation/calmly smoking in the sun” – as the world barges past.

“I was never as happy as I was when I wandered slowly on the backroads of the French countryside,” he remarks. And yet the urban street has so often been his muse. “A crowd is a collection of individuals, and each individual is an atom of that crowd,” he says. “I don’t enjoy crowds that come together out of necessity, like on public transport at rush hour . . . but I don’t dislike wandering around in a crowd that has merely this wandering around as its purpose, for example during the summer, on the banks of the Seine, or a Sunday on Grafton Street.”

Read the full article at Irish Times…

Related articles

• Mindfulness and Flânerie (virtualdavis.wordpress.com)

Back in 1997 an in-depth feature on digital storytelling ran on SFGate.com (home of the San Francisco Chronicle), and it’s still referenced today because it offers such a comprehensive, almost encyclopedic introduction to digital storytelling. If the concept is new to you, this is a great place to start.

So what’s a digital storyteller? They are artists/writers using new tools and techniques, like HTML hyper-text linking for the web, animation programming in Macromedia DirectorPremiere, to tell their stories, and digital movie-making using Adobe.

These tools, and many others, are helping or perhaps even forcing writers and artists to think outside the realm of traditional linear narrative. Every aspect of storytelling; structure, plot, character, pace, voice, timing, and setting, has the potential to be morphed by digital contact.

Many of the new technologies, emergent themes and innovative projects are worth examining as a way to understand the current and constantly evolving state of digital storytelling.

Read the full article at sfgate.com

Although this already sounds a little dated (we’re already a full decade into the new millennium after all), it’s a basic, clear and helpful digital storytelling primer. You’ll find lots of great links to resources to accelerate your learning curve.

Perhaps the most important information comes in the first paragraph, a reminder that remains relevant today:

“If you don’t have a good story to tell you might as well save yourself the expensive digital bells and whistles and go back to your writing table. Content is still, thankfully, king.“

Over the last dozen years, the tools available to the digital storyteller have increased dramatically. It seems like every day there’s a new online resource to facilitate digital storytelling. It’s easy to get swept up in the razzle-dazzle, but strong narrative fundamentals are a prerequisite. A fancy mixer, oven and baking tin won’t create a delicious cake without the right ingredients. And a talented cook!

Writer Kris Spisak weighs in on vooks:

This concern, that digital storytelling in general and vooks in particular may compromise our ability or will to imagine, continues to pop up. I’ve explained that the sort of digital storytelling worth aspiring to should accomplish the opposite; it should fire the imagination and inspire readers/viewers to become active participants in, contributors to and sharers of the stories…

Read the full post at The Overflowing Bbookshelf.

The Center for Digital Storytelling is “dedicated to assisting people in using digital media to tell meaningful stories from their lives…” Central to their mission “is an enduring respect for the power of individual voices and a deep set of values and principles that recognize how sharing and bearing witness to stories can lead to learning, action, and positive change.” This is one of the progeny of Dana Atchley’s work in digital storytelling.

Storybird Quick Tour from Storybird on Vimeo.

Take a tour of Storybird

Attention parents, babysitters and elementary school teachers. Have you discovered the Storybirds website yet? Storybirds are short, visual stories that you make with family and friends to share digitally. And soon you’ll be able to print them as well. Neat! The perfect place to start: Timothy, the Existential Bear…