I’ve already shared my affinity for radio programs such as the moth, and I also enjoy the occasional This American Life episode, also on NPR.  For this week’s assignment, I listened to the This American Life episode, There’s No Place Like Home.  Although they were … Continue reading →

What a (long!) week and part of it is my doing, given that I’m turning in my Week 1 assignments late. I’ve been in Twentynine Palms, CA all week, on business so my posts are 3 hours behind Eastern time.  … Continue reading →

Searching for something to storify…(The real title to this post) I’m still in the process of identifying a specific something for my final project. After viewing the Meet Your Modern Office video and the Google Nexus 7 video, I can … Continue reading →

If I were to play a words association game, and the word in play was “storytelling,” I’d respond with “oral history.” For generations, many civilizations have passed on their cultural material and traditions through oral lore. Some of these oral … Continue reading →

My favorite TV show is The Amazing Race. Although it is supposed to be reality TV,  unscripted, and unpredictable,  each episode is edited to tell a compelling story of the contestants’ adventures. Below is a graphical depiction of the typical … Continue reading →

Up and Down the Story Goes….

As part of a school assignment (GMU EDIT 572 Digital Audio/Video Design), I was to Explore the Shape of Stories by applying Kurt Vonnegut’s structure of stories to a story, poem, song, etc., familiar to me. Reflexively, my mind went immediately to, yes, The Princess Bride. It’s not as timeless as Cinderella, but it has all the elements, a bit remixed for 21st century […]

“Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!” The white rabbit from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland best describes my feelings about this assignment. This is not how I envisioned my first blog entry would be, but my … Continue reading →

Storytelling is a series of events which have actionable items that play on a persons emotions. Stories can be audio, …

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On last weeks episode of Surviver, Cliff a tall former basketball player on the Braun team thought that he had …

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I have to admit, my journey in DS106 has been a bit intimidating. Having a background in digital media and a fairly comfortable presence online, I was not expecting to be quite so overwhelmed. I personally attribute this feeling to … Continue reading →

An example I have of something that could be “storified” is a presentation I was tasked to pull together for the volunteering I do at my church. Four people have decided to join our church and will be baptized in … Continue reading →

Storytelling to me brings to mind my grandfather. He loves to tell stories about history, his own life, a great book he’s read, pretty much anything. Storytelling to me, therefore, is sharing an experience, whether personally or indirectly, that has … Continue reading →

Welcome to Security tips 101. Your one stop shop on protecting your home computer.  You will find information and tricks on …

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Just to demonstrate the use of Galleries for your wordpress sites, here’s what I have been suffering through this past week… You should first enable some of the gallery features in your own site via Settings — Media You can create these galleries from the images you upload to wordpress, via the Add Media Button. […]

Well, that was certainly a roller coaster of a week–not expecting that! This has been a TOTALLY different experience, and I’m loving it. On a personal level, I can’t remember the last time I truly wrote down my thoughts. I’ve never really blogged before, and it has been liberating; almost as if writing in a […]

What storytelling means to me: it’s a journey with someone. It’s personal. It’s engaging, and it makes you feel different emotions. It can be used for many different reasons, such as sharing and preserving histories and cultures; for simplifying a difficult concept or idea—like a metaphor; and for entertainment. A story usually has a beginning, […]

When asked to think about a story I’m familiar with, I thought through various movies, plays and books I’ve read but none seemed to quite hit the mark in the way I envisioned. Since the theme of my blog is … Continue reading →

When I was taking my driving test as a young 16 year old, I almost failed. I had heard from more than one person that the Massachusetts state police officers try to trick you into going down a one way road the wrong way. With this in mind, I set out on my test with […]

Hmm, what is a story? I think at the very baseline, a story is a sequence of events culminating in a conclusion. I tend to default to humor in all aspects of my life, and when I think about stories, I can’t help but start laughing. I think of everything that has happened to me […]

Once upon a time…there was a boxer called Mickey Ward who lived in a working-class suburb of Boston training to be a boxer. Every day….he would train with his brother to try to win a welterweight title But one day….he was put into the ring with an opponent who was much heavier than he was, […]

As the start of Spring is finally here, I decided to theme my site around this wonderful season. I currently use WordPress to manage a website so working with the site wasn’t brand new to me, but I have never … Continue reading →

The Fighter storyline, I believe, aligns with a couple of the rules. One that jumped out was rule ‘#15: If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.’ Our hero is a pretty undramatic, patient character, with strong families ties. The story is ‘gritty’ so the […]

As I watched Kurt Vonnegut talking about the shapes of stories, all I could think of was my favorite TV series of all time: South Park. Almost all South Park episodes are broken up into three separate acts and/or plots; all of which converging at the end to create a comedic masterpiece. While it is […]

A film that follows Vonnegut’s approach: The Fighter, directed by Rusell, and staring Wahlberg, Bale, Adams and others. It begins with a disheartened boxer, who is being trained by his older brother and managed by his self-serving mother, getting beaten up and knocked down by a heavier, mismatched, opponent. (This is the downward slump ‘phase’.) […]

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine I use the word reflection often in teaching ds106- it has shades of meaning, and less of looking at your own outward appearances but re-processing the work you are doing in learning and practicing digital storytelling. Sure Malcolm Gladwell suggests if we do […]

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine For the first week of DS106 Goes to Work, I’ve asked students to be on the look out for things in their world that might benefit from a “storified” approach. This was deliberately left vague, and I want students to struggle a bit […]

A road is a rich visual metaphor, a path, a sense of adventure, leading you someplace, openness… but in the case of Cormac McCarthy’s book, it is also one dark view of the future of our quite/unquote civilization. The tale is usually described as grim. post-apocalyptic– and the setting most certainly is, with the cannibalism, […]

Welcome to my second blog site. I like to consider myself pretty quick with technology. So, I raced ahead with my first blog site but after-the-fact found issue after issue. So, I took my second blog site a little slower, and here I am. My thoughts on setting this up?  I don’t consider myself a blogger at […]