CogBlogged Tagged ‘storytelling’

This may set a record for the most un-managable blog title … this week. For some reason (help me Jim!) I cannot find the link for Assignment 4 in ds106 – it was more or less two do two weeks of posting photos in response to the prompts of the Daily Shoot. Heck, I’ve been doing it for over a year, if I were a slacker I would apply for former credit! When it started a week ago Sunday, I hatched an idea to ratchet up my own challenge. I’d been thinking about what could be done ti link/connect the daily shots together, maybe a theme. Then I thought about writing a story that the photos would be a part of. Then I had the crazier idea… Inspired by the crazy innovation of Christopher Nolan’s Memento, I would aim to tell ny story backwards. Each day I would seek a [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Are you scared yet? No? Well you should have tuned in to our late night live radio show on #ds106radio — with Bryan Alexander visiting me here, it was the perfect plan to hatch. Sadly he seems to have been adbucted overnight by aliens, as have I. Scary Stories from Strawberry I cannot full say how much fun this was to do. I was inpsired to recall stories from The Thing at the Foot of the Bed, a book I enjoyed (or was spooked by) as a kid. I ordered a used copy on Amazon, but it will be another week before I can go back in time. We did this half planned and half improv. We sketched out a script of us talking, than getting spooked, and then something really weird happening at the end. [...]

What hath Jim Groom wrought? A few spare body parts, some electricity, whilring dials, and some hunchbacked assistant… ds106 The Mad Open Online Course is Alive! So it’s not even place, it’s three weeks out, why are all my colleagues, friends madly in their labs, and doing of all things, retro 1990s techno things like animated gifs? Now anyone can create an sloppy animated gif (like me)- it was this site @jimgroom first tweeted If We Don;t Remember Me that set this up as an art form It is not just anything animated, it is a key selection of subtle movement from a single scene of a movie, placed in the ancient package of an animated gif, that makes it come alive. So what beter source then the original monster creation? is there anything more freaky than Colin Clive‘s portrayal of the manic doctor? In that opening scene, his head [...]

Jon Breitenbucher invited me back again to do a remote (via Skype) presentation on 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story for the week-long Instructional Technology Faculty Fellows program he and his crew run at the College of Wooster (by the way, they are rocking with wordpress multiuser there). When I did this last year, it was one of the best sessions I’ve had; a lot because Jon’s team had prepped the faculty, so they already had done some pre-work to pick their story idea. The way we run it is I do the presentation first thing in the morning (wich was really early here on the west coast time!), the faculty spend about 3 hours working with the tools. We then convene after they are done, and they get to talk about what they were able to create (or the problems they had). This time around, I used [...]

This is the newest Dominoe story created in a tool so new and exciting I don’t have a category. I heard of Zooburst first in March 2010 at the NMC Symposium on New Media & Learning when Craig Kapp did one of the most outstanding presentations I’d seen anywhere, a session on the Augmented Reality projects he has done in a year at NYU (see the presentation materials, including a YouTube video of the whole session). We’ve also been pegging Zooburst it as an example in the recent NMC Horizon Reports. It is a web-based content creation tool for making a 3D story that pops up on a page when viewed on the screen. You can have 10 pages in a story, each with a caption. Even viewed on the web it is impressive, you can spin the book around and view it from different angles. Any object can have [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by ·Music Moves My Feet· I will definitely show my age era here. Yes, you kids with your “digital buy a song for 99 cents mix it up on your pod” may have something special you will blog about in 20 years. But for me, in many ways, there was nothing like the music that defined the Album Rock period that ushered me through those teen years. It’s one thing to have a good song, but an Album, for many musicians, was a concept, a whole, and there was not only the music, but the art on the cover, the liner notes, the stamp on the disc… it was a feast. What do you get in an iTunes download? Just bits. So I had a hankering to come up with a list of ten albums that were formative to me- not the ten best albums [...]

Stephen Downes highlighted today one of those wonderful simple ideas that can go (and has gone) a long way. In An Idea That Keeps Growing Doug Peterson shows how his simple idea took off– to use online maps to create a walking tour of the place he grew up. As Stephen suggested where he plotted his own tour of Metcalfe Ontario, this is a great simple activity one can do for some online storytelling- now with Google Street view, you can literally snap photos of your old neighborhood, and mix that with your memories, and shazam! Digital story. It’s something most every person could do, assuming they have a childhood they don’t mind recalling. But hee hee, it is not often one gets to say he did something way before Stephen, but (cough cough), I posted a memory map in flickr back in 2005 when a group started to collect [...]

It’s been on my to do list since August, but I finally got the last mile of code done to restore my Five Card Flickr stories site to life. If you had not played with this before, the initial description tells it all: I’ve been ultra interested in the idea of telling stories in pictures. Ever since I saw Ruben Puentadora’s workshop on web comics back in 2007 (and later at the 2008 NMC Summer Conference) a little idea has been brewing. Ruben does this fantastic group activity based on work from Scott McCloud, that makes creative work, from all things, of old Nancy cartoons. Using the Five-Card Nancy web version of Scott’s original card game, Ruben conducts an exercise in visual story weaving. Basically, you get a shuffled deck of five panels from different Nancy cartoons, and you have to pick one at a time to, in five steps, [...]

I saw Mikhail’s effort of telling the story of The Shining in 6 Frames in response to Jim Groom’s explanation of this as an activity used in his digital storytelling class. But c’mon, how many other ways do you mix up Jack with an Ax, Jack in the Ice, Jack in the Bar, jack poking his head through the wall, Jack as Woody Allen (oaky, Mikhail, that was clever and rule bending) ? Yawwwwwwwn I was looking for some different angles on the story. Some made up ones. For me, the Shining was a story about a boy, his toys, and his boundless love for a Dad who gave him more and more toys.

The subject of the video below grabbed my interest and curiosity from where I saw it first on engadget. But as I watched it, I was mesmerized first by its elegance. Not being a film critic, the simplicity of its form (no music, no spoken words beyond the ambient), the detailed closeups impressed me. But more than that, if there was not a title on the video, and I just watched it, there is a smartly created sense of mystery as to what is happening, slowly revealed. Done straight up documentary style, with an opening credits sequence, hip music, and some professional announcer voice, it would have no magic or charm. Thankfully, it was not done that way. I only wish they would have not titled the video in a way that totally gives it away. I could have done something to mask it, but imagine you have not seen [...]