I was talking to Allan Gyorke a few days ago about some different options for a pre-TLT Symposium workshop. This also happened to be the same day that myself and the DC team had had an opportunity to hold a conference call with Bryan Alexander to discuss the work each of our groups are doing around digital storytelling. So we got into talking about running a DS workshop similar to the one we did at the Digital Commons Tailgate last Fall.
Basically the way this goes is that participants get into small groups, pick a topic that's relevant to them professionally (very important), write a short script, collect additional media assets (creative commons-licensed pictures and music), shoot some video of the team members acting out their script, and then pull it all together in a short piece which they upload to YouTube with a group tag. The whole process, from idea to learning the technology to publishing lasts only 3 hours. You can see a little video of the process here:
This doesn't really capture the energy of that afternoon, but the participants loved it, and it was the subject of conversation during the whole next day of the conference. I think people were all pretty amazed at what they could accomplish in such a short period of time. That was precisely the point, the "a-ha moment" we were hoping for - that anyone can pull something like this off in a classroom, and it doesn't have to take multiple days. And by allowing everyone from this diverse group to pick their own topic relevant to their field of work, it showed the flexibility of the activity. To be fair, the outcomes from this activity are very rough, and some of the more intensive DS workshops I've heard about explore the concept much more deeply and result in a much deeper understanding and appreciation for the value of digital storytelling. Our position is that if we can make the subject seem very approachable to educators and they can see outcomes very quickly and have time to reflect on the process, they're more likely to try it with their students.
So we're going to try this the Friday before the Symposium. Allan and I were also talking today about introducing some new tools into the mix and letting participants pick what they want to use. 12seconds.tv and Sound Slides are some examples. This would help people evaluate the affordances of different tools and make strategic decisions about what would work in their classrooms. That approach will necessarily add a certain element of chaos to the workshop, but a little bit of chaos is a healthy thing and certainly didn't seem to hurt at the Tailgate.
Three cheers for Chaos!
I think some of the tools like 12seconds.tv on the iPhone and SoundSlides help to show people that there are many many ways to do digital storytelling. Bryan Alexander's workshop just used wikis and I thought it was very successful and approachable.