CogBlogged Tagged ‘storytelling’

I routinely delete those emails (and rarely get to the bottom, the trash impulse comes quickly) that come in requesting me to blog about some software/web site/product… “This ain’t no request line, try WXYZ…” But one came this week that made my drop my routine (it’s got storytelling! web sharing!), because in the first sentence it hooked me. My Teacher, My Hero is a new site that will open soon as a place for people to share stories about their favorite teachers, and a place for people who may think they want to be teachers… to be inspired. My Teacher, My Hero strives to give thanks to inspirational teachers across the country and inspire new teachers to join the profession. We hope to help raise the status of teachers in our society and recognize the integral role that they play in shaping our future. With your help, we feel that [...]

My session yesterday at the Open Education Conference was absolutely the most fun thing I have put together for a conference. it was so fun I did not wait til the night before to finish it. The images above were totally not necessary, but I found myself up at 1:30am mocking up old covers from a collection of scans of the original Amazing Stories magazines (for which, I openly admit, I may not have permission to do). So if you want to watch the presentation, you can do so via the UStream recording but to be honest, it is better explored via the Amazing Stories site— the CoolIris version of the presentation (more or less a glossy way to browse the stories), or the individual stories as launchable videos, or the URLs relevant to the stories, or even a flash player to play them all sequentially at http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/opened09/. The Idea [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Today was the day seven years ago my grandmother passed away. When exactly she was born (sometime in 1905) is a matter of fuzzy record, as she herself told, as her birth into a family of 7 siblings raised by her father in Newark, New Jersey was certified more 50 years later through research into the census records, so it was celebrated on October 15. “Granny” as I kiddingly called her, was always special to me- she had lots of spirit, drove fast in her red Rambler (“I don’t want anyone behind me complaining about being stuck behind an old lady”), took me to see Johnny Unitas and the Colts play in Memorial Stadium, and was always keen to go jump the big waves at Ocean City, MD. I had also kidded her about she had to stick around til she was at [...]

Help! Please. I am taking 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story on a spurt of road shows over next 2 months- Barcuch College, Penn State University, Salem State College, and online version for Wooster College, and then a session at Ed-Media. Gulp, am I becoming one of those shlock presenters that milks a show til it wont bleed anymore? I hope not. The entire presentation mode is going to change, and I am rolling in some new secret pieces. In the next 2 weeks, the content is going through a sweep– links checked, 4 dead tools dropped, and several to be added. Currently I am down to 63 (from 64), but have at least another 5 I could add. Recently added are Prezi the sweeping swoopy cool presenter too (see example) and Pixton- a rather powerful comic creator (see new example). I could use some input, and you [...]

I love this 3 minute TED clip of Rives telling a love (or not) story played out in emoticons: (sideline complaint- I installed a new version flash and now about 20% of the web sites, including my own, cannot load the content, WTF?) You know how the motivational thinkers trot out the “thinking outside of the box” phrase (nod nod nod)? For creativity, there are almost interesting things that happen when you are being “creative inside the box” (I made that one up) — when you find a creative way to tell a story in a limited expression form, say the keys on your keyboard. Now the example above really does not fall into that, because what makes it work as much as anything is the live performance. I’m interested in collecting some more things like this, one might chalk ASCII art (now I am showing my generational colors). The [...]

The editor of EDUCAUSE Review, a good friend and fellow Arizonan, has been nudging me a few years to consider writing an article. Sure I blog a lot, but a publish article requires things like grammar, references, and coherency… so last Spring I suggested co-authoring as a crutch. Over the summer, I was honored to collaborate with Bryan Alexander (that guy can write! We wrote the draft on Google docs and tagged madly our resources) on the article just hitting print/PDF/web in the November/December 2008 issue – Web 2.0 Storytelling: Emergence of a New Genre: We are hoping to stir up some conversation about this, and are eager to have some push-back on our assertion. Our research googling on the topic mainly brought up… us! But as we’ve talked about it in our presentations and workshops, we get lots of nods of agreement. Our article describes Web 2.0 Storytelling as [...]

I had some code fun in September creating the Five Card Stories site, which provides a simple activity in visual storytelling by making a visitor select from five rounds of randomly chosen images to string together as a story told only in pictures — now the source code is available from Google Code (I would have liked to call it alpha version 0.0000001). I designed it somewhat general, as I had two different ways I thought of getting images- one from pulling ones from a given tag in flickr and the other were taken from ones submitted at the Learning 2.008 Conference in a ning forum. The source code provides what you need to run the flickr version. On my site, there are now 516 photos people have tagged to share and as I write this, there are 290 stories that people have created and saved on the site– alot [...]

Wow are my PHP coding pencils dull, but I’ve had some fun last 2 nights getting them back (we’ll see how sharp they really). I have a really crude, ugly, unformatted demo of a tool I want to use later this month for a session at the Learning 2.008 conference. So I am asking (a) for feedback on the idea I think is brilliant may not be; (b) contribution of some content by simple tagging. This blog post will wander a bit on concept and sometimes take a nose dive into code but may surface again. 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 [...]