cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog
By request, today I did a presentation on 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story via Skype to a group of faculty at the College of Wooster (Ohio).
To do this they had my Skype video on one screen and the other had a web browser open with my series of "slides" as web pages open in Firefox tabs (see the presentation materials). It’s a little tricky because I cant see the audience too well and cannot even see the screen they are watching.
But it went great- Jon Breitenbucher et al had done a fantastic job of setting this up by having the participants already fleshed out story ideas.
At first I thought the local story prompt I gave them was going flat, but they picked it up crazy.
So the prompt was about an unlikely person spotted eating pizza at a local joint (Matsos). They group came up with this story:
* the unusual person was Dick Cheney
* the owner Matsos, a guy named "Spiro" came out and serenaded Mt Cheney with operatic music
* People were watching for a reaction, following the action on twitter…
* But Cheney started choking on his pasta….
And as usual I left them with an assignment to try and wrap that up.
What worked well today was the group then spent a few hours working on their own stories, and they even had a lot of them posted on their group blog (and a few of them ran with the Dick Cheney story! see this excellent one done in Pixton) by the time I returned a few hours later.
We got then to talk about their experience– but they really wanted more time to work with the tools.
This was fun!
I’m pleased with some of the changes I made following a few iterations of the show earlier this month on the East Coast– especially Cole Camplese’s suggestion to use more of the educational examples rather than blasting them with the Dominoe story all over again.
But it was really the good design of the things around the workshop by Jon’s team at Wooster that made this go well.
Thanks again for doing this Alan. Every single participant was jazzed after your talk and they all had a great time just playing with the tools. In part their already having written an essay, turned it into an audio essay, and posted it to the blog allowed them to be more creative with the tools you showed.
Thanks for the great presentation, Alan. The IT folks and the Faculty loved it. A few of them are working with the tools today as they plan projects and tech solutions for courses they will be teaching next fall. Thanks again and enjoy your summer!