Archive for December, 2009

Community Voices

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009


Supporting Community Voices

The launch of Community Voices projects is drawing nearer. Organisations will be invited to submit their projects for funding by The Media Trust early in the new year. I was interviewed by one the researchers from Corporate Citizenship who compiled the report that informs the approach to be taken by Media Trust towards the Community Voices project. It’s good to see that Digital Storytelling features in the report.

It is my intention be as fully involved in Community Voices as is practical, hoping to bring to the project my conviction that storytelling can be an important factor in digital inclusion. I am therefore pleased to able to offer support in any way I can, including displaying the project’s logo and links on my sites. If you want to know more just click on the logo or the links.

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Digital Story Telling @ the University of Gloucester

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

Digital Story Telling

Digital storytelling, the technique of combing narrative with digital media, into short movies emerged as a practice in the 1990s.  The technique exploited the increasing accessibility of technologies for capturing audio and images and was exploited particularly for community and social projects.  It can be seen as an adaptation of the storytelling tradition which has existed for more than 6,000 years (Abrahamson, 1998).  Digital stories have been described by The Digital Storytelling Association (http://www.dsaweb.org/) as “the modern expression of the ancient art of storytelling”;. Meadows (2003) identifies it as a social practice, telling stories with easily accessible low-cost technology.

via Digital Story Telling.

There are some useful references at the end of this short article from the Centre for Active Learning at Gloucester University

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iMovie 8 Madness

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

I have started to re evaluate iMovie 8 (part of iLife 09) as a tool for digital storytelling. I was beginning to warm to it until I began some tests to nail down it’s behaviour with still images.

Now it’s driving me to distraction – it’s so inconsistent. So my write up will take a bit longer than I’d hoped. On the whole, at this stage, I’m disappointed with iMovie 8. Transitions make a mess of timings, fine editing is tedious and too many numbers have to be typed into boxes when dragging a clip edge should do the job. More later – hopefully with fewer grumbles …… or perhaps I just need to lock myself away in a darkened room to calm down and wish for a bug fix in Snow Leopard for iMovie HD.

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