Students at Ysgol Gyfun Gymraeg Bryn Tawe, Swansea, were active in the recent BBC School Report project. Nia Davies and Beccy Leach from BBC Cymru Wales went to help the students. Here’s one of the films which is a great example of the way in which older people in the school’s community can work with school students to produce a piece of media. This is an embed of their video in Silverlight format: Cynllun Rhyng-genhedlaeth
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From Truprint to Facebook
Up until the 1990s, passing round a Truprint envelope full of 6″ x 4″ photographic prints was the norm; nowadays we publish our own online and ‘Like’ our friends’ photos on Facebook. Increasingly, that’s how we pass round our snapshots. This is a great moment to capture that change in the way we share our personal photos. “From Snapshots to Social Media – The Changing Picture of Domestic Photography” is a new book by Risto Sarvas and David Frohlich from University of Surrey. David has a fascinating history in Digital Storytelling as the pioneer of Audio Photography and one of the people behind the StoryBank digital storytelling sharing project in…
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Digital Storytelling Influencers – an update
List of 52 influencers on the right hand side of every page in this blog takes on board some of the suggestions sent. It’s still quite a personal list. And it's not a final list.
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Video Nation – final screening
Last night was a poignant one. Even before I was involved with digital storytelling, I’ve been a fan of BBC Video Nation. I first became aware of it when I saw an job ad in the early 1990s announcing that the BBC Community Programmes Unit was recruiting people to develop uses for the Hi8 analogue camcorders that had heralded the introduction of near-broadcast-quality consumer video cameras. The fruits of that project, founded by Mandy Rose and Chris Mohr, were five to ten-minute video shorts scheduled before Newsnight on BBC 2 TV. Last night I went to London’s ICA Cinema for the final screening of Video Nation Network’s Turn Back Time…
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The secret of COW’s success – six lessons.
No punches were pulled in portraying the crash, so people who saw the film talked about it afterward. Lesson 3: be memorable
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How to get your short film seen by 500 million
When Newport University film studies lecturer and social action broadcast specialist Peter Watkins-Hughes went to Tredegar Comprehensive School students with an idea for a short film about teenage drink driving they said: “It’s not drunk driving that’s the biggest problem; it’s texting while driving”. Peter didn’t have much of a budget, so he asked Gwent Police for help. They gave advice, use of their helicopter, their vehicles and their officers as ‘extras’. When the film was shot and edited, Peter put it on You Tube so he could send a link to BBC commissioners. Within a week, the film had had 50 views. It then rose to 200. Then Peter…
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Seven articles about helping participants capture their story in digital storytelling
The person who’s taught me more than anyone about helping people find their story is Gilly Adams. She was the main story facilitator of BBC Capture Wales and she shaped the Story Circle day so it was a close a fit as possible for the digital storyteller in Wales. At DS3 in 2008, Gilly spoke in her keynote of the gift culture of digital storytelling “…where no money changes hands but the currency is the generosity of grace in sharing stories”. The person who hears the story gains two benefits: 1. they get a unique glimpse into the heart of the teller 2. they can often say: “hey, that’s about…
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The personal, social and environmental impacts of technology and media
I mentioned Jason Ohler’s new book ‘Digital Community, Digital Citizen‘ last year. Jason’s just emailed me, saying: “I thought you might be interested in my article about digital citizenship and character education, in the new issue of Educational Leadership. It echoes a number of points from my book” The article’s called Teaching Screenagers – Character Education for the Digital Age . One of the challenges Jason sets out is tantalising: “Imagine how differently a school district might behave with the following goal in place: Students will study the personal, social, and environmental impacts of every technology and media application they use in school.” I quite like the converging-lives approach of teaching…
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Victim and Victor
You can now embed CultureShock‘s digital stories on your websites or blogs, thanks to a new feature on their website. So here’s the story Victim and Victor by Michael Crannage which CultureShock’s Alex Henry showed at DS5:
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Tokyo: New Horizons of Digital Storytelling
Mell Expo 2011 in Tokyo on the weekend of 19 & 20 March 2011.