I lived in Japan for three years as part of the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Programme (despite the spelling, Yanks outnumbered Brits by a big, big number in JET). My job while I was there was to teach in ten different schools. In one junior high school, I taught all the time. In another, […]

  The blog has been doing all kinds of morphing and evolving–and this isn’t even its final form!–these past weeks and it’s time to take just a little bit of stock, to try to get some kind of handle on what the heck we’re doing here. Back to Work First, there’s the return to DS106 […]

A photo of the cube sculpture outside of the LSA building in Ann Arbor. The assignment was to take a very colorful photo and translate it into black and white. While the original photo wasn’t that colorful–lots of browns and blues–the black and white brings out all of these great elements that aren’t as visible […]

After Issa Written by @heystorytellers on April 1, 2014  I. Climb Mount Fuji, O snail, but slowly, slowly. And stay out of room 814. Seriously. Those peeps are cray-cray.   II. Even with insects— Some can sing, Some can’t. But you should see the water strider singing “Hooked on a Feelin’” [in room 814].   […]

A High Protein GIF Written by @bagman106 on March 31, 2014 Ingredients 18 meatballs (these are the best) 6 hardboiled eggs (if you can’t boil an egg, go here) Non-toxic magic marker Recipe 1. Cook the meatballs. 2. Boil the eggs. 3. Arrange the meatballs into a 2-dimensional “bag” on a flat surface, e.g. a […]

It’s funny the feelings you get re-watching things that you made a long time ago. I get similar feelings looking through old photo diaries that I get to watching these old bagman clips, and it’s great. I get to re-experience how much fun I had just experimenting with personas and webcam borders (which are a […]

I remember very clearly the day I took these pictures. It was generally ugly winter weather, not like the blizzard-whiteout ridiculousness that we had (and are still having!) this year. I’m pretty sure all of these were taken right outside of the laundromat where I was washing my clothes. I had brought my camera along […]

In third grade, I took a test—a bunch of us did—an aptitude test I guess. In one part of it, we got these diagrams of shapes—red and yellow angular things—and we had to replicate the shape using multicolored blocks. It was a snap. I’m still good at that stuff. If that was a job or […]

This Is Just to Say (after William Carlos Williams) I have taken The phoenix That was in Phoenixville   And which You were probably Hoping Would burst into life from ashes   Forgive me We are best friends We stay up all night faceswapping politicians And playing Wii Golf.  

This is an experiment, this new “What I’m Watching” category on the site. I’d like to spend some time talking about each of these Haiku Decks, for example, but I also want to encourage myself to share more of other people’s work, to make the site–and the work that I’m using the site to progress, […]

  As I said in my last post, I’ve been updating my social media channels, clicking through and seeing what needs to be refreshed, taking some stock of where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing digitally for the past few years. One of the biggest hits that I’ve had with making stuff is Bagman. […]

As I’m updating my social media channels, I came across a few of my old photo diaries over on flickr. Some of them are for DS106 and some are just me tooling around. I really like some of these photos–for various reasons, I haven’t taken very many at all this winter, and remembering how white […]

I once knew a pastor who said that minds and lives don’t change because of single books or single words, but because of single paragraphs. That, in terms of altering the basic structure of a person’s thinking–and, maybe, therefore changing their behavior–that a book is too long, too fragmented, too inconsistent, and a sentence is […]

Live storytelling, for me, is as close as we’ll get to the origins of story. Writing–the second oldest storytelling technology–is maybe 6,000 years old. Humans, however, are 150,000 (or so) years old. Meaning for the vast majority of our time as a species, we told stories around the cook-fire, to celebrate seasonal events and holy […]

So it’s been awhile since I wrote up what I’ve been working on lately with the blog, so I figured I would do a quick wrap up of what I’ve been up to. Recent blog posts include: A wrap up of my thoughts on Lisa Cron’s Wired for Story An evaluation of four new digital […]

The Future The end of class. The last class on A Farewell to Arms. Everyone in the class has their laptops open. They are furiously uploading, half of them to the class-specific dropbox account, half to the public-facing section of the school website. Those who use dropbox don’t want to share what they’ve made with […]

It should be called “Human-Brand Love” not “Brand-Human Love,” in the same way that an “Italian-English Dictionary” is different than an “English-Italian Dictionary.” The love, you see, can only move in one direction. According to Fast Company, a company named Innocean has been doing research into why people “love” certain brands, what that connection is, […]

Our migration over to the new site is complete! It’s not a complete migration: I’ve left all of the #umdst stuff over at the old site, so that DS106′s assignment bank can still link to it, and so former students can still find material from the class if they’re looking for it. From now on, […]

Here are some quick thoughts on some of the storytelling tools that I’ve been using these past few weeks. Again, I found them all through 50 Ways to Tell a Story. Glogster Glogster is such a fun mess. With Glogster you can make what is essentially a digital, interactive version of the slightly disturbing, free […]

I totally wrote this whole entire post about one of the chapters of Wired for Story, analyzing whether a particular bit of advice was useful or not (it very much was) by looking at two different depictions of the X-Men character Jubilee (NOTE FOR NERDS: I was pointing out how you couldn’t possibly have moments […]

So, in these weeks I finished reading Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal with posts on: Why people tell stories How nobody knows why we dream An assessment and analysis of Gottschall’s overall argument and definition of story and storytelling I also began what will probably only be a few blog posts on: How I discovered Lisa […]

The story actually starts way back when I learned to read, but I’m on the clock, so let’s flash forward. I was sitting in The Last Word in Ann Arbor, drinking Rob Roys with a filmmaking acquaintance from out of town. This pal kept talking about the book, Wired for Story, which he was using […]

The rest of Jonathan Gottschall’s book The Storytelling Animal is concerned with providing evidence for the argument that he started in the beginning of the book—that all storytelling emerges because of our need to practice problem-solving, and that this relationship to imaginative—and imagined—conflict is what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. To […]

I’m not sure that dreaming really deserves a lot of airtime in a storytelling blog. I mean it’s related, I guess, but that connection seems tenuous to me. But Jonathan Gottschall devotes a whole chapter to it in The Storytelling Animal, so here we are. I used to take dreams pretty seriously. When I lived […]

  Why do we tell stories? I don’t mean, “Why do some people like getting on a stage and others would prefer to sit at home and binge watch House of Cards season 2?” What I mean is: Why did human beings evolve in a way that makes them capable of making, understanding, and enjoying […]

This was the first week of my ongoing, poorly-defined “Storytelling 101” project, where I try to break down what storytelling is so that I can highlight—hopefully?—the connections between the history of storytelling and storytelling technology and the explosion of digital story-making tools available to the citizen storyteller. This week was mostly taken up with re-reading […]

Happy Valentine’s Day! Speaking of subject changes, I used a couple of different storytelling tools this week. Here are my thoughts on them. I. 30Hands For the narrated slideshow, I used 30Hands. I didn’t really choose to do a narrated slideshow, though, I just went to 50+ Ways to Tell a Story and chose the […]