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.

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

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.

Culture Shock records ordinary lives in North East

By Culture24 staff | 28 October 2009

(Above) Culture Shock participants editing their digital story. Photograph courtesy Culture Shock

A project in the North East is allowing local people to contribute records of their own lives to the permanent collections of the region’s museums and galleries.

Culture Shock aims to help visitors create 1,000 ‘mini-movies’ in the course of some 100 digital storytelling workshops.

via Culture Shock records ordinary lives in North East | Culture24.

Last year I trained several teams of digital storytellers who have since been running workshops for a project called Culture Shock. The first stories (over 200 of them) are now online. The site is smart and functional and well worth a visit.

The stories are, of course,  a fascinating insight into life in the North East as inspired by the museums collections in the region. All ages are represented from school children to some who are even older than me!

My congratulations to everyone involved in this project. They all worked hard in the Training Trainers workshop and they have clearly continued with dedication to pass their skills on to other storytellers.

Here’s the summary of the DS4 Festival posted by my friend Gareth Morlais on his blog Aberth Digital Storytelling.

This event is this weekend May 16th. There are many storytelling events scattered across the globe – although not many in the UK. I am gathering stories at a digital storytelling workshop in Birmingham for engineers, but it’s not open to the public so it doesn’t qualify as an event for the International Day.

If you want to take part in a passive way why not treat youself to watching a few digital stories on the digistoriesuk YouTube Channel?

To start you off here’s a story from my family …

Details are now available for an International Digital Storytelling Conference – also in June 2009.

This one is in Portugal and is being promoted as the follow up to the last international conference in Cardiff in 2003.

I am unable to be in Lisbon for this conference as I am fully booked up in June to run workshops here in England.

So if you are up for the DS4 Festival in Aberystwyth followed by a conference in Lisbon the details are here.