This is an overdue post, and even though we’re still five days away from the official start? I think? on the 17th?, I still feel like catching up here with what I’ve been doing with digital storytelling so far.

I found DS106 while researching innovations in education last year for a job. I went through the first few weeks of Summer of Oblivion materials and was shocked by how awesome everything seemed, how tools which had intimidated me previously (photo and audio and video editing) were so much easier to learn if you had something fun to to make with them. The goal was to amuse myself, my friends, the various online communities I belonged to.

I played around with making new book covers for books I loved, with photo covers for my own short stories, with bookmarks (or bookmark-shaped images) constructed from the images of famous (famous to me, anyway) short story collections with the titles remade into first person, past tense statements (e.g. I BREATHED UNDERWATER-Julie Orringer; I RAVAGED, I BURNED-Wells Tower; I TUNNELED TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH-Kevin Wilson). I showed people, they thought they were cool. Positive reinforcement.

I was enjoying myself, so I dug a little deeper. I started keeping a journal of the books I read, just a quick writeup for myself (I am more motivated to write posts for a blog that mostly I read than I am to write in a journal, for whatever reason). I bought a book–The New Digital Storytelling: Creating Narratives with New Media by Bryan Alexander–which I’m only a third of the way through now.

Then, my schedule opened up a little, and I decided to sign up for the actual MOOC DS106 for the Winter term.