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.
We're setting up a SMS wall and hoping the participants will text in their thoughts around new tech....
Full post follows...
The Darby and Joan club is a well-attended group. A good number of its members owned mobiles with varying degrees of familiarity with their handsets. Mog and I enjoyed this session a great deal - it's always rewarding to be able to answer questions, demonstrate new tricks and show people how to do things they're stuck on. However one member stumped the GEECS - we couldn't work out how to delete sent text messages from a Sagem handset! (We have since discovered that there isn't a way to do it - phew!)
Nina the group leader has invited us back to do some further sessions with the group, and one lady in particular had a huge amount of interest in our work as she had worked with the BBC's Capture Wales project previously and made her own Digital Story.
We'd also like to wish Betty a happy birthday, and say thanks ever so much for the birthday cake! We like cake :)
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Hi,I thought I'd better write a quick post to introduce myself as the project's new Outreach Worker.
I'm really pleased to be working on the Digital Storytelling project, and am excited about the work that Mogs and I will be undertaking over the next 18 months or so to help communities benefit from the diversity of technology that is available to us these days. It's a great role for me as I am a techno-enthusiast, so as well as helping to share my enthusiasm and burgeoning IT know-how with others, I'll get to develop new skills at the same time.Over the past few days I've been working closely with Mogs learning the ropes - I hope it's not been too painful a process for him! As part of my 'learning by doing' regime I have made my first ever digital story. Had I realised it would be offered here for the world to see I might have chosen to focus a little less on dogs...!
I've also spent some time absorbing the project's background and structure and am looking forward to meeting the other field workers and project officers to further develop my understanding here. Now that I'm beginning to get up to speed with the way the project has been working, I'm keen to get out and about and run some training sessions. I'm also starting to form some ideas around how we can further develop the variety of training and services that we offer... Watch this space!
(image courtesy of Mei Lewis)
We're very pleased at GEECS to welcome Angharad as the new outreach worker for the Communities 2.0 project.
Angharad started just Monday but is already hard at work producing her introductory digital story. We'll post it here on the front page as soon as it's ready.
We've already had a number of discussions about how we can take the project forward in terms of new and creative means of offering digital inclusion activities with a twist - pervasive gaming and it's application within social media is just one of an exciting range of workshops we'll be developing and offering over the coming weeks.
We've also been talking about how we can include geotagging and related technologies with a storytelling twist - always trying to make it relevant to the people that we're working with.
So hopefully you'll all be able to meet Angharad very soon and, let's be honest, it's a great change from my strange furry face!
In other news you can now find our calendar over on the resources page (HERE) where Angharad has already endured the agony of being turned into a "Wally"....
We hope the inclusion of our calendar will help everyone to easily see where we are, and as we've said, if we can do it we will - especially if it's just a quick hour taster session.
Anyway, there was a post I did which was part of the breakout session we ran at DS5 where I generated a random scenario for people to write an SMS story about and then send them to the blog (thanks to Frankenstory for the inspiration). The results are on the right.
The festival itself was great and agin, now in it's 5th year, DS cymru continues to inspire. Here's some links to reports and pictures of the day:
Gareth Morlais' blog is a great DS resource in itself!
DigiStories are always doing great stuff, there's plenty of resources here, but I must personally thank Barrie for his kind words...
A great day was had by all and probably the highlight of the day for many was listening to Joe Lambert's keynote:
Here's the PDF of one of our new workshops that aims to get people thinking about the potential of new technologies. There's a new and improved recipe card over on our resources page.
I've just been looking over a lot of the social media stuff I've been working on for the last few weeks and suddenly realised that I've been going against my own advice - the blog has indeed been quiet, eerily so for the last few weeks!
So, in an effort to put things right I've shifted my blogging activity over to posterous.com which should enable us to post quickly and efficiently via web mail, mobile phone and utilising their very cool bookmarking button. I reccomend checking it out.
Posterous is free (for the time being) and enables instant publishing to a variety of platforms including facebook, twitter etc as well as the blog over on blogger. I really like this idea of easy insatant publishing - very much the "one button" approach I've been looking for.
So what's been happening?
Well, quite a lot:
Our train the trainer digital storytelling sessions have been quite a success with around 25 people trained up and ready to go in digital storytelling, including some who have already organised some DS sessions. I think that with this approach we are able to build capacity on the ground and reach a wider audience in order to help them get the most out of digital technologies. I'd like to thank everyone involved over the last month or so for their enthusiasm and fabulous stories which you can see over on the storytelling space.
We've also been getting a great response from some of our quick introduction workshops aimed at getting potential participants to get what they want out of DI by using digital photography to help tell their stories about how they feel about technologies.
I'll post some of our presentations and other resources here very soon.
Leanne has been a great asset to the project during the last 8 months or so and brought a cheery enthusiasm and creative approach to all of our work. Plus of course she managed to put up with me for all that time.
I'm sure I echo the feeling of the stortelling centre and the wider partnership as well as all the community groups we've worked with over the months in wishing Leanne all the best with her new venture and we look forward to hearing the stories very soon. Thanks butt!!
On a related note we do have a new member of satff starting in August so I'm very much looking forward to working with Angharad and continuing to develop the creative and happy approach that Leanne has left behind.
A great video posted over on the digistories site explaining the thinking behind the creative commons approach of licensing work. It's something we're very keen on an I hope this vid explains the benfits better than I can!
By the way, you might notice I'm posting this from a site called posterous - a great way to instantly publish content to multiple platforms via email, text or a bookmark in your browser.
Hopefully this will help us post content quicker and keep the blog more up to date.
There might be a few strange posts happening as I try and figure out how we can get the best out of this resource.
Here's the PS Elements tutorial we used for a workshop demonstrating how we can use the concept of storytelling in still images. I made this presentation over on Prizi - a very neat site that allows some free hosting of presentattions that can then be embedded and shared. Very nice tool.
I'll post this tut over on the tools page too.
DS5 presents a jam packed day of inspirational speakers and practical sessions on every topic you can think of within the field of digital storytelling and some you hadn’t considered! All this plus a wide range of trade stands from the main funding organisations, community development schemes and many more and a unique opportunity to network with the digital storytelling community in Wales, the UK and beyond."
Tickets are now on sale: http://www.dscymru.org.uk/
Adult learners' week kicked off for us yesterday in Evanstown Community Centre.
As part of the weekly events that are happening around Wales, we were asked to deliver an introduction session to the software Photoshop Elements. At a beginner stage, with all photo-editing software (be it Photoshop, Elements or the great freeware option GIMP), the important thing to get your head around is an organised work flow and the use of layers within a working project.
As we love our stories here in GEECS, I thought it was only appropriate to incorporate this into the session. So the idea I had was to do ‘Ten Word Stories’. Each participant was given a word that was randomly generated from our custom built generator. With this word in mind, they had a few minutes to take a photo that somehow illustrated the word and its meaning.
From their image, each person was then asked to create a relating story in no more than ten words. This was all brought together in Photoshop Elements, learning the basic functions of the workspace and tools and we got some great results...
Wales Co-op (you knew I was gonna use that pic!!!) had suggested that we look at the brand values of the project by utilising one of our workshop approaches based around digital photography.Marketing Pix from chris mog on Vimeo.
One of the great things to come out of this day is the way in which this group viewed and interacted with technology; a great quote form the day - "I bet 100 years ago there were a group just like us saying that electricity was never going to catch on..."
The taster session in texting on mobile phones in Brtion Ferry was a great success.
Not only did the Briton Ferry Health and Well Being Group witness the mobile phone being used as a spirit-level, a musical instrument and a lightsaber amongst other things, all participants texted us a short story (maximum of 10 words) relating to a randomly generated word.
Below are some of the stories that came out of the event...
TECHNOLOGY:
1. This workshop should allay my fears about modern technology
2. I know nothing at all about it so help me
FEAR:
1. one of our worst fears is losing our personal identity
FAMILY:
1. We have very little family to speak of poor us
COMMUNITY:
1. The community in briton ferry is very good, and strong
MEMORY:
1. We dont have a memory, thats the problem
