I’ve written about BBC Cymru Wales’s PS site before. PS now has a brand new sister site for teachers. As producer Nia M Davies says PS for Teachers is all about using personal stories to “engage young people aged 14-19 in Personal and Social Education.” It’s a bilingual site, in English and Welsh. Topics tackled include: Active citizenship Health and emotional well-being Moral and spiritual development Preparing for lifelong learning Sustainable development and global citizenship There are personal videos to watch and show, lesson plans and an invitation for students to upload their own digital stories, video diaries and other experience-based videos. Class discussion topics are suggested and there are…
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The best digital storytelling opportunity ever?
Spanning the UK and Cape Town, University of Surrey Digital World Research Centre is advertising a Research Fellowship in Digital Storytelling. This could be the best digital storytelling opportunities I’ve ever heard of because: – you’ll get to model and produce digital story forms that are most suitable for the intended local audiences/producers/participants by working with ethnographers and technologists – you’ll work in the UK and Cape Town, along South Africa’s Wild Coast – you’ll benefit from work already done by the university’s StoryBank project in India – you’ll get to work with Prof David Frohlich, pioneer of Audiophotography and a former HP Labs Europe innovator – it’s a well-funded…
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Telling your story in a taxi cab
I’m working at the Urdd National Eisteddfod – a major European youth festival – in Aberaeron, Wales, this week. Colleagues from the BBC Welsh-language children’s news programme Ffeil have been recording viewers’ stories using an adapted London black taxi cab as an experiment here. It’s not something they’ve built themselves; it’s been hired in. The cab contains a video camera which starts recording onto a flashcard as soon as someone opens the door and sits in the cab. Question prompts can be given either on-screen or, in the case of Ffeil, by a presenter off-camera.This taxi strikes me as a fleet-footed story capture device. The best way to use this would…
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How storytelling is saving hundreds of lives in Welsh hospitals
“I was back in the hospital having my dressing changed after an operation. I’d had a lot of stitches. The nurse arrived with a pen in her mouth. She took off my old dressing and ran the pen which had been in her mouth along my chest to check all the stitches. After changing my dressing she walked on to the next patient tapping the pen against her teeth.” This is the kind of patient story that’s been used in re-training staff to be aware of ways in which hospital bugs are spread. Hearing a short account like this has proved effective in changing hospital staff’s ways of working. The…
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News from the Center for Digital Storytelling
Joe Lambert of CDS just emailed some news that will be of interest to digital storytellers in the UK, Europe and beyond: 1. Joe’s giving the keynote at DS5 – the fifth Digital Storytelling Conference – in Aberystwyth, Wales, on Wednesday 16 June 2010. The cost is GBP15. http://www.dscymru.org.uk/ 2 There’s a CDS Digital Storytelling workshop from the afternoon 17- 19 June 2010 at the Knowledge Lab, London: http://www.lkl.ac.uk/cms/index.php. The workshop is open to the public and you can find out more about it and register at http://www.storycenter.org/standard.html#london The cost is $495. 3. Lillehmammer Digital Storytelling Conference takes place in Norway from February 5th – 7th 201. It’s the conference’s…
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How to squeeze digital storytelling advice into a little Tweet.
I was asked a question on Twitter yesterday by @katycom1972: @digitalst Would like to explore digital storytelling with my 2nd graders. Any tips on getting started? We use a MAC/Imovie 9. Thx! It’s incredibly difficult to fit any sensible advice into 140 characters. What I really wanted to say was: it’s the story that’s the most important bit of the process; if you get a good story, a great digital story is within reach working in an expertly-facilitated group or groups is a good way for individuals to bring out the best from their stories the facilitator needs to prescribe a form. This helps people know what they’re making. E.g.…
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“What has been important for you in your life?”
That’s the question Hanne Jones and Eli Lea from Flimmer Film asked as they went from door to door at old people’s homes in Norway. The answers they were given were as different as the people they met. ‘My Days’ is a collection of 37 memories told by people between the ages of 79 and 104. These digital stories are in Norwegian with English subtitles and they’re each around three minutes long. The music’s beautiful and the storytellers’ voices have such warmth and, at the same time, gravitas that they took me by suprise and brought a tear to my eye. Watch, for example, Alf telling the story of his…
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Ataxia S. Wales and digital storytelling
Alan Thomas is a seasoned traveller. We first met at a BBC Capture Wales workshop in Haverfordwest, Wales, and we’ve met a few times since then too .. at DS4 and at BBC Wales and it’s always good to catch up. Alan has a condition called cerebellar ataxia which affects movement, balance and speech. Ever since making his first story, Alan’s been an advocate of digital storytelling when meeting people, speaking at conferences and in his blog. Alan is now Chairman of Ataxia South Wales and they’ve just launched their new bilingual website at http://ataxiasouthwales.org.uk Alan went on to make another digital story – facilitated by the George Ewart Evans…
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StoryWorks: Looking for the Story workshop
Delivered on April 28, Pontypridd, Wales, by Gilly Adams and Georgie Meadows, who say: “To be effective practitioners and offer compassionate and good care, we need to be able to see each patient as a special and unique individual…Using pictures as our starting point, we will explore how we can be more aware of the stories of those who cannot tell their own.” The cost of this half day workshop is only £30 and there are details here. StoryWorks has a new website at http://www.storyworksglam.co.uk with mainly health-related digital stories about OCD, ADHD, cancer, etc. This organisation has also done work with explanatory storytelling. For example, they worked with the…
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Digital Storytelling in Nordic countries
I had a query recently from Liz Milner, Bristol, via Mandy Rose, asking about digital storytelling in Scandinavia and northern Europe. Here’s a list of the ones I could think of; please feel free to add others using Comments: Hanne Jones, Christer Fasmer and Eli Lea of Digital Fortellinger . See also the end of this blog post for more in English about that project. Lisa Heledd, formerly of the BBC Capture Wales team has trained trainers in Norway. The European Center for Digital Storytelling is part of the CDS and they have a Ning Group. You need to join (free) to read and post. CDS has run other projects…