An exciting new project launched yesterday, January 15, 2008: The International Day for Sharing Life Stories, co-sponsored by the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley and The Museum of the Person in Brazil. It will be held May 16, 2008. Here’s their press release.
Archive for January, 2008
Listening to old Dylan, the line “His clothes are dirty, but his hands are clean” resonates–I remember how much the line meant when the song first appeared: I was living at Black Bear, and the image of the hard-working country lad doing honest work outside the crumbling “system” was our [male] fantasy. There’s a whole line of reflection from this image about the sex role stereotypes it supports, but I want to talk about the class implications. I am still astounded at the success of American consumer culture in erasing the idea of the working class. No one is working class anymore, we are all middle class–until we’re not, and then we’re just failures.
The implication of Dylan’s line, for me, is that doing honest manual labor, the quintessence of being working class, absolves one from the guilt being a “capitalist tool” by having a physical product to show for the work. As the economy becomes a knowledge and information factory, with data managers of one sort or another predominating, from the grocery clerk to the mechanic who must each be competent computer operators to succeed at their job, the sense of connection to physical work products becomes obscured…
digital storytelling carnival
Published January 10, 2008 Fred's , digital storytelling Leave a CommentTags: blog carnival, digital storytelling, literacy, public education, Santa Cruz, storyboarding, technology, video in the classroom
Will link to this post from
http://www.thedigitalstoryteller.com/
I’ll be taping at Community TV in Santa Cruz next Tuesday, and I made a 1′40″ clip from my “String Epiphany” piece for them to air.
Talking with Jon Silver of Migrant Media Productions who hosts a show on education in the local community about what he want to bring out in the 10 minutes we’ll hove to talk, we got into an exchange about attributing the decline in literacy to the increased use of technology. I countered that, properly used, technology should enhance and facilitate and inspire increased literacy, from the script writing, storyboard sequencing, and tech manual reading that’s required to create a digital storytelling piece, to the publicity and verbal skills used in promotion, when the student owns their piece and wants others to see it. And of course it has to begin with authentic writing.
Jon agreed, and I look forward to an interesting discussion.
