It was more than enough fun to co-author an EDUCAUSE Review paper with Bryan Alexander, but more fun to run a workshop on it at the 2009 NMC Summer Conference. We had a really active group of participants, and certainly no lightweights, as there is some pressure trying to stand up and tell something new to people like Gardner Campbell, Chris Lott, Nick Noakes, Phil Long, etc.

What we did not have was enough time.

Bryan and I had tossed together a long list of ideas which we tried to whittle down to the wiki page for the workshop:

Before the workshop, we asked participants if they did not have them already, to have accounts on twitter, flickr, voicethread, glogster, xtranormal. As an experiment as we went around the room doing normal self intros, we asked them to also tweet an intro using our #web2storytelling hash tag — this was pretty active, and other people at the conference enjoyed following along remotely.

We moved people into groups, and with pre-made group wiki pages for each to add.record their work. Being in Monterey, we came up with names like Whale Watchers, Steinback Fans, Canners from the Row, Looking for Clint Eastwood, and Summer of Love.

Our plan was to have them do some simple activities that built on each other, ideally at the end producing a story for the group (We did have some interesting discussion during the workshop whether it was more appropriate to create singly or in groups).

The first activty was meant to introduce them to Voicethread- we created one we called Mystery Places with flickr creative commons photos and some prompts to get them to respond using the VoiceThread tools.

They then were to choose one as a group to start as a “setting”, figure out how to get the image in their group page, and add some notes to the wiki describing the setting.

We then did a little song and dance on creative commons image searching, and asked them to find and use at least 2 more flickr images that could build on their story.

Next we introduced the concept of developing character voicing, and gave them some time to see how this has been done using blogs as a narrative tool. We then gave them an option to use twitter to develop a character (tweet out what a character might say) or use the fun movie creation tool xtranormal to do a mini movie (e.g. like this example).

They all dove into xtranormal.

We could barely get their attention back.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

We ran short on time for what we hope was the close, building out a story as a video using something like Jaycut or a web media poster tool like Glogster. Our idea was we had slips of paper to hand them with our own crazy pre-scripted movie endings, like “The spaceship landed and we all went inside” or “They danced with joy among the Hobbits” thinking it would be fun to see how people make a path to a given ending.

We did not get quite that far, but if you looka t the groups pages and see what they did, you might agree with us that they certainly did a lot for a 3 hour slot. See:

• Whale Watchers
• Steinback Fans
• Canners from the Row

Thanks again Bryan for being fun to work with and everyone who was there who was fun to create stories with.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Xtranormal’s mission is to bring movie-making to the people. Everyone watches movies and we believe everyone can make movies. Movie-making, short and long, online and on-screen, private and public, will be the most important communications process of the 21st century and its democratization is a massive business opportunity. Our revolutionary approach to movie-making builds on an almost universally held skill—typing. You type something; we turn it into a movie. On the web and on the desktop.

And all of this rang as 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story material. As I am preparing to do a remote online intro for Dean Shareski’s class this Monday, I am spiffing up the site and re-acquainting myself with old and new tools.

After an hour’s play, I am amazed as this little app, which almost belongs n a category of its own. Again, it’s tagline is “If You Can Type Text, You Can Create a Movie” which is not quite true. You also have to know how to click your mouse. So when you create a movie, you get to choose if it will be one or two characters, pick a set, music, and avatars for the characters. Now at first reaction, you are going to find it limiting, because there are fixed choices for everything.

But step back- this is another example where limited tools (being boxed in) should make you dig deeper into your creativity, of creating something inside the box, rather than whining about the box.

What you get then are more icon/tools you can drag into a script box, to change the camera angel, to add sound effects, to animate your character, etc. And then you simply type in the dialogue, then create a new box, lather, rinse, repeat:

When it renders as a movie, it uses text to speech, and the character’s lips move. Okay, so it is not Hollywood, or anything close, but it is damned easy. So I used it to do another version of the Dominoe story — and lacking dog character and an ability to do multiple scenes, I made it so the person was just telling the story i his room. It is quirky, and I am not exactly sure why the American male chose is wearing something that looks like a halter, but that is beside the point.

You get your expected embed and URL direct links, but another nifty feature (starting to be part of more tools) is a direct export to YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6MsI7rkh50.

In Xtranormal, you can group your movies into a “Series” suggesting it’s best use is serialized shorts. And I have not explored the “remix” option, but am thinking that would be the way to do multiscene movies (or just put it in a series).

But this is besides the point- there are some nifty things you can do with creativity, in teaching camera angles, script writing (could be used to block out a dialogue?), and likely more.

But I just think it is an amazing tool, and when/if the creators get word of this post on their various keyword alerts- plea se please please leaveat least some version of this as free for educators!

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 “telling of stories using Web 2.0 tools, technologies, and strategies.” emphasizing two components- microcontent and social media. We feel the rich media, non-linear capabilities, jumping of media platforms (or even ARG-like going out into the real world) make for a much different kind of expression than producing a personal video of some dog story.

So we want to generate some conversation, resource sharing, responses in story form. Our plan is then to have an open wiki-based discussion space for the month of November, after which we will archive the site as a resource for EDUCAUSE. The wiki address was provided in the print and web versions, which went live Friday (I thought we’d have til today), so here is our Web2Storyteling wiki:

Please help us out by getting some things into the four main response sections of the wiki (it is open to editing, no log in required). There is nothing more self-reinforced as lonely as an empty/sparse wiki. When people see a blank space, it seems they hesitate to be the first to write.

Please please pretty please toss something into http://web2storytelling.wikispaces.com/– I am hopeful with the light inbox and RSS readers that not all edtech heads are at EDUCAUSE conference in (lovely) Orlando.

As described there,

Whilst making Shoot The Summer I’ve been thinking a lot about the capabilities of the mobile in film making and story telling. I Twittered my thoughts at the Cambridge Folk Festival then converted it to audio using my Mac’s text to audio recognition software. I then dropped it over clips filmed on my mobile phone. The results are quite interesting.

It’s really not that complex a task, and to me, would make for an interesting assignment for a film/media class. More details at Telling Stories with Twitter.

Add to the interesting pile, Shoot the Summer:

‘Shoot The Summer’ is a film documenting a summer of festivals shot entirely on mobile phones. The film was shot by our DJs, our artists and most importantly our audience. The film covers a diverse selection of events including Cambridge Folk Festival, Summer Sundae, London Mela, Notting Hill Carnival, Creamfields, Bestival and Proms in the Park, to name a few.