Intro- prelude that sometimes you never know where a silly idea may take you http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/50ways
It ’s easy to make fun of PowerPoint, and most of us have been victim of really badly done PowerPoints. But no one sits down with the software planning to bludgeon you with bullet points. The software does not make that happen!
Often heard phrase, but I don ’t think it is that simple. With creative tools, it becomes a two way flow; I have ideas of things to create, but my use of new tools feeds back to my ideas. Tool metaphor fails. As I use a hammer, my pounding a nail does not lead me to new ideas of how to piece together wood into furniture; but my digital tools do.
Winston Churchill saw the interplay of our environment and what we do.
CogDogBlog name where it came from
But I love serendipity and strange coincidence. The initials I chose are CDB, which at age 5 was my favorite book. Any one familiar with the book? http://bit.ly/lFMpM
William Steig created this one frame multimedia stories (drawings/pictures and text, of sorts) Ask audience to guess So let me talk very generally about what happens to us in school. We start in kindergarden, elementary school, and we are encouraged, have all these opportiunities to be creative in art, drawing, painting, collages. It is pure multimedia, We are not judged wrong if we forget a comma, or end a sentence with a preposition. We go to middle school and hormones wreck us- if we do write/create, it is dark, often mediocre, and not meant for public viewing. In high school we learn all these structures of proper essay writing, doing outlines, putting crap on notecards. We learn how to mimic the style that gets good grades. In college, we learn to speak like academic, fall into passive tense, write professionally. We get jobs and have to write reports and business coorespondence that does not have a shred of personality into it. Its my mission now to help people get back to 1st grade- to be free of contraints, to express themselves creatively, visually, and nor weorry about the comma police. To freely and openly express!
I am thinking more broadly then the digital storytelling form that is beautiful but pretty much linear video. I've been trying to figure out if there is a genre of Web 2.0 Storytelling- but its really just an expression of an idea, thought, true or not done with text and /or audio and/or video on the web. Paper I co-authored in December 2008 with Bryan Alexander http://bit.ly/1UTdt3
So today I am going to talk some about web tools for creating stories, a lot of tools. If you want to go your own way, everything I can covering is at http://560ways.wikispaces.com/ This is the new version, updated from the original at http://50ways.wikispaces.com/
In my workshops, people have a limited amount of time to develop an idea they can explore with these 50+ tools, so I look for ways to help people get started. In a setting like this, as an example, in next slide I will display a prompt. Just say or write the first thing that pops into your mind that would make for an interesting story. Be creative, think visually!
This 50 Ways had its roots for a workshop I planned for a trip I did in October 2007 to Australia (8 capital cities in 2 weeks, that’s another story). This year, I had been making use of Slideshare for presentations (show) and when they came out with the ability to attach and synch slides to audio, i thought- this so a great way to share stories. Then I saw this site called VoiceThreads (show) which was amazing (explain this voicethread) Also Slideshare- a tool many people know about, the “YouTube for Powerpoints” - like the video site, it takes large pieces of media, converts them to flash, and provides tools for making them easy to share in other web sites. At the same time I was thinking about Slideshare, Voicethread came out with the feature to synchronize a slideshow with audio. Seemed like another tool to create multimedia slideshows… And I knew of maybe 4 or 5 other tools for doing web presentations or slide shows with sounds. And I began to wonder, how many tools are there? 20? 30? ...50? My rules for inclusion are loose- the tool must allow you to create something from more than 1 media (images and text, images + sound, images +video + text); tool must be free, and it must be completely web based
At the same time, I had just watched the tribute to Paul Simon from the Library of Congress- one of the most gifted musicians in my book. And the song "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover" floated by, and I said to myself, I wonder if there are 50 different web tools out there... and that's how this idea was born. And the answer is-- there are more than 50, but also, as a meta lesson, this illistrated a concept I had been trying to articulate- that the web is really big (pause) No we know that, but is one a sprawling scale beyond human comprehension, like the effect we have standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon. No one can realy know it all, and if they make sweeping statements like, "Blogs are just diaries" or wikis are security risks -than question these statements, because there is no way for anyone to have seen every blog or wiki! Question any so-called expert who makes a sweeping generalization about anything on the net- cause they are liars
And since I was doing this as a workshop, I realized that if I found 50 tools, I'd have to know how to use them. And I got this really silly idea- what if I used the same media and story in every tool! I then wondered what I would use, and it would have to be well contained. And I remembered that a year or two ago I had done a video- voice over stills for the 60 second story contest, so I had a story and the media. I was on my way. http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMp-Fl-sXrU http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/50ways/dominoe-mov.html
To demonstrate the story creatiion process, and what I did for my own work, a storyboard with images, and short sentences for captions/action http:// cogdogblog.com/stuff/50ways
Also added images to flick as a set- there are some tools that happen on flickr, but also, a number of the other tools allow you to import images directly from flickr. http:// flickr.com/photos/cogdog/sets/72157600975093412/
Part of the wiki is a page with all 50+ Dominoe stories, notes on the tools http://50ways,wikispaces.com/50/Dominoes
o in the workshop, I break it down into 3 easy chunks: (a) develop an idea (the hardest part); (b) find some media (use creative commons stuff; and (c) put it into a tool.
In workshop, can be challenge to get people to develop brief story ideas that can use. At this site, I provide a few suggestions including story prompts, links to images that might generate an idea. http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/StoryIdeas I also found a bad example helps. I found this version of Cinderella that a man in Ireland created to celebrate/mock the 20th anniversary of PowerPoint. I wont show it, but if you flip through the story on Slideshare http://bit.ly/cindy-ppt you will find endless unreadable bullet point slides, inscrutable diagrams, and it is just appaling (talk through Africa exmaple)
So let ’s go back to our story we started earlier. We want to brainstorm about 5-7 steps in the stories as an outline in a Google Doc.
Next, if we have not done so, we acquire our media. My cardninal rule (usually broken) is thou shalt not use Google Image Search! Use Creative Commons resources or create your own
http://50ways.wikispaces.com/StoryMedia
Flickr cc search http://compfight.com
Use advanced Google Image search (highlighted box should be on “labeled for reuse” (not commetcial)
http://compfight.com
So NOW it is tool time. So here are the 50+ tools I had found (show). For each one, I provide a brief summary, I link to the story I created, in both linked and embedded versions. I also include examples of stories created with the tool, many of them done in my workshops or by participants after seeing this presentation.
http://50ways.wikispaces.com/StoryTools Groupings- slideshow tools, timeloine, map based, audio based, video, mixer, presentation There is not nearly enough time to show them all, so I am going to fly through a few that I felt were more useful. Please do NOT ask me to tell you the "best" tool as that is an impossible request, especially as they change, your needs vary, etc. Pick one. If it does not work, toss it.
http://50ways.wikispaces.com/Tools+By+Media
Examples of the Dominoe story in some of the tools and also a set of stories others have made.
Share what you create! See also How to Contribute to the wiki http://50ways.wikispaces.com/50Contribute