BBC iPlayer won the main Judges’ Award at last night’s RTS Innovation Awards. I was there with Karen Lewis because BBC Digital Storytelling had been nominated in the user generated content category along with Channel 4’s Landshare and The Sex Experience. Landshare won in this category. It was great to see Karen Lewis for the first time since DS4. Since leaving the BBC, she’s set up StoryWorks at the University of Glamorgan and doing some really exciting work with Communities 2.0 and with people who have cancer at Velindre Hospital, Cardiff, and much more. At the RTS, the most interesting award from the point of view of participatory media was…
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Contributors or Collaborators?
For 15+ years, Mandy Rose has been a champion for the individual as author/publisher. Tomorrow night, she delivers an RTS (Royal Television Society) talk called Contributors or Collaborators . This is timely as the web’s shift from publication/communication to collaboration/social interactivity lends itself to collaboration in documentary forms. Mandy commissions multi-platform productions at BBC Wales and is researching the role of the producer / curator in collaborative documentary at the Faculty of Creative Arts at the University of the West of England. I worked with Mandy when she was editor of New Media, BBC Cymru Wales, and I’ve learned such a lot by working with her. This was such an exciting time as she commissioned…
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Moving image archive meets personal story
Here’s more about how we worked with people who had stories to tell about what the heritage of the Rhondda Valleys in Wales means to them in Valleys Kids’ Rhondda Lives project. This post follows a question from Cheryl Colan: “…Did the individual storytellers work with and direct the video editor? If they spent only 2 hours doing so, I imagine the editor did a reasonable amount of preparatory work, getting clips to choose from lined up, prior to this work session?…” There were many days of preparatory work in researching, finding, selecting, rights-clearing, digitising, etc. the clips. Lona Wharton and Gareth Morris did this at the BBC and Dafydd…
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Hyperlocal freelancing opportunities
$14,000 per annum is one local blogger’s estimate of how much he’ll earn in the coming year by covering local stories. Seattle blogger Justin Carder does the math(s) on this page. Justin is one of the speakers at the free Portland Oregon Digital Journalism Camp – Saturday, August 1 at The Oregonian, 1320 SW Broadway, Portland, Oregon 97201.
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Coromandel Digital Stories, New Zealand
“It excites me that I can be part of this new age. Words, pictures and music if anything can lift the sprite and engender enthusiasm” – Joan van Oosterom (87) More than 70 Digital Stories have been produced since the project started in January 2008 by the Coromandel Community Digital Storytelling Project. It’s an initiative to record, preserve, and share the history and stories of the Coromandel community using Digital Storytelling. It’s all about creating lasting impressions. Workshop equipment includes: 6 shuttle computers (20x20x30cm) Adobe Premiere Elements software Headphones Cano Scan 8800F scanner (scans slides and negatives as well as photographs and documents) Printer Projector & speakers Sound recording equipment Discovered via…
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Aberystwyth DS4 Festival advance details
Here are the latest details about the fourth annual festival of digital storytelling in Aberystwyth, Wales, on Wednesday 17 June 2009, from a press release from Aberystwyth Arts Centre: Following on from the success of DS3 the fourth festival of Digital Storytelling DS4 aims to inspire and encourage and show the exciting possibilities of Digital Storytelling and brings you up to date with what is happening in the world of Digital Storytelling. Whether you work in education, the community or as an artist, it is your opportunity to share experiences, explore new creative ideas, see the latest technological developments, look at examples of best practice in the U.K. and worldwide…
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Two ages of media literacy
Reinforcement of the importance of creation* in media literacy today by Jason Ohler: Media Literacy 1.0 – the era of mass media – concerns the ability to identify and evaluate the techniques of media persuasion. Media Literacy 2.0 – the era of digital participation – the ability to identify, evaluate and apply the techniques of media persuasion. * OFCOM defines media literacy as: “the ability to access, understand and CREATE communications in a variety of contexts”.
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End of workshop photo
You can tell how well a workshop went by looking at the end-of-workshop photo. This one was taken at the end of the first Media Conté Workshop where media exprimo and Aichi Shukutoku University worked with teenagers in Kani, Gifu Prefecture, in the centre of Japan’s largest island. Kani is well known for its car manufacturing. One of the leaders of Media Conté is Akiko Ogawa, who’s made two trips to Wales to study digital storytelling. She told me earlier this year there were many Japanese descendants from Brasil and other countries who had come to work in Kani’s factories. She told me she wanted to find a way of…
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What a museum is
Museums used to be buildings that housed artefacts. The experts contextualised these objects by writing historically-accurate interpretations of their meaning. Visitors used to enter museums to absorb this. How often have you looked at objects in museums and thought that the meaning an object has to you is different to the one conveyed by the museum’s card, plaque, kiosk, etc.? New technology and ways of working mean that can change. Some museum managers are excited about the possibilities opened up by enabling visitors to share their own interpretations and are asking their staff to work in new ways. I did once hear one museum worker say “But that isn’t what…
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National Older People’s Day stories
Digital Stories available to watch again on BBC iPlayer until the middle of next week: “To celebrate National Older People’s Day and to change some outdated stereotypes on ageing, a collection of short stories written, recorded, edited and produced by people living in Wales.” This is a link for people reading this in the UK only, sorry, because iPlayer only works in the UK.