GEECS have recently developed a new storytelling blog & blogging workshop for community groups. Building on the social media workshop that we already offer, we can now deliver tailored & creative sessions around blogging using the Tumblr platform. A very popular and extremely easy-to-use personal publishing tool, Tumblr, is one of the simplest ways to publish online.
The new story blog, Tumbled Tales (http://tumbledtales.tumblr.com), is a space for its authors, Angharad & Mog, to capture/showcase the ‘stories’ we see all around us which intrigue, enthral, inspire, touch and make us laugh. Our stories will be posted in any media format – showcasing digital stories in the broadest possible sense of the term.
We hope that Tumbled Tales will not only help generate interest in storytelling generally, but also foster a better understanding of the variety of digital storytelling-based training options that are available to community groups from GEECS, for free. We’d welcome your stories too - please feel free to submit your own via the submit section on the Tumblog.
Apart from developing this new workshop, Mog and I have been mulling over a number of ideas for new workshops recently, and we'd love to hear your opinion on them...
Having worked on the Our Bridgend project (see here for our post) we're very keen to use similar mapping technology in our storytelling workshops. We're currently looking into developing our own online GEECS map which will allow workshop participants to upload content, or stories, of all sorts to a specific place on the map...Watch this space!
We're also considering developing a workshop around E-readers / I-books. I-books are an interesting emerging field that uses new technology to deliver traditional & familiar content, often at a fraction of the cost of a printed book, and sometimes for free. Users can browse an unlimited library of publications and download them directly to their 'reader'. Given that we're from a Storytelling centre of excellence, I thought it would be remiss to not cover one of the most exciting developments in reading & story disemination in our suite of workshops!
I'd like to develop a workshop that looks at two or more sides of any given story, since there is always more than one side! We have also discussed a Picture-Poem workshop, and seperately I recently discovered www.nevver.com, all of which has got me thinking about associative storytelling techniques and ways to run workshops that generate associative content... Do let us know what you think.
Finally, it was indeed a sad day last week when we at GEECS said au-revoir to Leanne Taylor who's off to Penarth to become a tailor (see what I did there?).
