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Today, I led part 2 of a webinar on social media messaging for digital literacy efforts, hosted by One Community’s Connect Your Community BTOP project in OH. Below are my presentation…recording of the full webinar coming soon on http://vimeo.com/channels/connectcommunity.
PS – Go to my older post for part 1, including a recording of the webinar! http://verdesmoke.com/2011/09/storytelling-social-media-a-webinar/
In preparation for guest facilitating a webinar on Friday for the Connect Your Community BTOP digital literacy program in OH, I decided to take a stab at digifying drawing a diagram I’ve adapted over the past couple years to explain elements of a good story. This simple animation of a diagram I usually draw as I present during workshops on media storytelling and messaging for nonprofits and youth media production. I developed this visualization originally for a youth digital storytelling workshop with deaf middle school girls, while serving as an AmeriCorps VISTA with the Transmission Project. It’s based loosely on the Center for Digital Storytelling and Creative Narrations facilitators’ guides on narrative theory and scriptwriting for personal stories. I found the song on the beta Dig.ccmixter.org: ”Modestly_Rude” from by Nobuo3000.
[Reposted from ConnectorsClub.org, January 14, 2011 at 8:00am]
This week, I decided to reflect on George Ella Lyon’s poem featured in our Module 2 Media Literacy lessons, because I’m inspired every time I hear a personalized version of this poem coming out of instructors’ workshops or Digital Connectors programs.
Here’s my version, which in writing I realized that I hold my family as the source of where I’m from:
I am from pie plate, from Murphy’s oil soap and sawdust.
I am from the hearty appetite.I am from the tomato patch, the onion.
I am from Christmas eve readings of Luke and loud bickering, from Martinez de Silva and Gagne and Bonnevile.
I am from “you’re beautiful inside & out” and acceptance, bottomless giving, and nag, nag, nag.
I am from unconditional love and respect earned.
I’m from island, roast pork & potatoes and pork pie.
From the human-size donut story, the gear shift, and the “go pound sand” amid Portuguese curses.
I am from both the chest of yellowed snapshots and the my Dad’s Mac iPhoto library.
I am from…it’s never boring.
And here’s a video version:
Where D’s From from Danielle Martin on Vimeo.
In this world of remix and digital manipulation, it’s nice to get back to basics of rearranging WORDS to customize personal meaning. Here’s some of Lyon’s thoughts on the poem, reposted from http://www.georgeellalyon.com/where.html:
I am from clothespins,
from Clorox and carbon-tetrachloride.
I am from the dirt under the back porch.
(Black, glistening,
it tasted like beets.)
I am from the forsythia bush
the Dutch elm
whose long-gone limbs I remember
as if they were my own.
I’m from fudge and eyeglasses,
from Imogene and Alafair.
I’m from the know-it-alls
and the pass-it-ons,
from Perk up! and Pipe down!
I’m from He restoreth my soul
with a cottonball lamb
and ten verses I can say myself.
I’m from Artemus and Billie’s Branch,
fried corn and strong coffee.
From the finger my grandfather lost
to the auger,
the eye my father shut to keep his sight.
Under my bed was a dress box
spilling old pictures,
a sift of lost faces
to drift beneath my dreams.
I am from those moments–
snapped before I budded –
leaf-fall from the family tree.
Listen to George Ella read the poem.
“Where I’m From” grew out of my response to a poem from Stories I Ain’t Told Nobody Yet (Orchard Books, 1989; Theater Communications Group, 1991) by my friend, Tennessee writer Jo Carson. All of the People Pieces, as Jo calls them, are based on things folks actually said, and number 22 begins, “I want to know when you get to be from a place. ” Jo’s speaker, one of those people “that doesn’t have roots like trees, ” tells us “I am from Interstate 40” and “I am from the work my father did. ”
In the summer of 1993, I decided to see what would happen if I made my own where-I’m-from lists, which I did, in a black and white speckled composition book. I edited them into a poem — not my usual way of working — but even when that was done I kept on making the lists. The process was too rich and too much fun to give up after only one poem. Realizing this, I decided to try it as an exercise with other writers, and it immediately took off. The list form is simple and familiar, and the question of where you are from
reaches deep.
Since then, the poem as a writing prompt has traveled in amazing ways. People have used it at their family reunions, teachers have used it with kids all over the United States, in Ecuador and China; they have taken it to girls in juvenile detention, to men in prison for life, and to refugees in a camp in the Sudan. Its life beyond my notebook is a testimony to the power of poetry, of roots, and of teachers. My thanks to all of you who have taken it to heart and handed it on. It’s a thrill to read the poems you send me, to have a window into that many young souls.
I hope you won’t stop there, though. Besides being a poem in its own right, “Where I’m From” can be a map for a lot of other writing journeys. Here are some things I’ve thought of:
While you can revise (edit, extend, rearrange) your “Where I’m From” list into a poem, you can also see it as a corridor of doors opening onto further knowledge and other kinds of writing. The key is to let yourself explore these rooms. Don’t rush to decide what kind of writing you’re going to do or to revise or finish a piece. Let your goal be the writing itself. Learn to let it lead you. This will help you lead students, both in their own writing and in their response as readers. Look for these elements in your WIF poem and see where else they might take you:
Remember, you are the expert on you. No one else sees the world as you do; no one else has your material to draw on. You don’t have to know where to begin. Just start. Let it flow. Trust the work to find its own form.
[Reposted from ConnectorsClub.org, January 6, 2011 at 11:20]
Since many of you have received your FlipCam video cameras and are hitting media literacy and video production concepts in your programs, I’ve been thinking about the hints I always try to convey to instructors, youth and staff when they head out into the world with the camera in hand. While I love the FlipCam’s ease of use and happy lil USB arm, as a film-maker I know it has it’s limitations. The good news is, that there’s some easy ways to get some very good quality raw footage from the Flips, if you keep a few key hints in mind:
Police your Sound – The microphone on the Flip is not particularly strong, especially at extended distances. Find a good spot to shoot interviews or speeches, thinking about background noise like voices in the next room, air vents, or big loud machines like refrigerators. Offices with doors that close make good makeshift sound studios. Also, when you’re interviewing, remember the camera will not only pickup your subject, but also an interviewer behind the camera, including “uhuhs”, snorts, giggles, or squirming in the chair.
Make sure the camera is ACTUALLY recording – In over 10 years of teaching video production, I can’t tell you how many awful, disappointing moments have come up when folks realize that they forgot to press the Record button right before an interviewee pours her heart out or says the most profound thing ever.
And one final question to leave you with: if a video is shot on a FlipCam and no one uploads it to ConnectorsClub.org, does it make a sound? ;)
We’re not doing dinner at our house, but Dad is going to make a surprise appetizer.
And the results, in video form:
Post and photo by Danielle Martin.
CoLab Radio is tracking Thanksgiving cuisine across the country. Send your Thanksgiving food photos to colabradio@mit.edu and we’ll publish them on this site. Please include your city, state, and a brief caption.
[This post was first published on MIT Colab Radio blog, as part of the Media Mindfulness series]
This spring, I rode Boston’s #66 bus with a camera, an audio recorder and a gaggle of ten to sixteen-year-olds. Why? To jump on a unique chance to use photography as a reflective tool for investigating what makes neighborhoods tick.
A group of staff and volunteers encouraged these youth to use their new critical photographic eyes, honed during a fifteen-week training institute, to document and compare two neighborhood centers in Boston. Each youth, in his own way, formed a new definition for photojournalist and activist. These students are part of the Boston based international non-profit Peace in Focus. Founded in 2007, the organization aims to create social change by engaging youth in a dialogue about peace in their own lives and their communities and giving them the critical photojournalism skills to become local, place-based voices for change.
After four four to six-hour outings, the youth decided to produce a collaborative essay of photographic pairs, highlighting both visual and attitudinal similarities and differences in the two corners. These photos will become part of the citizen media displaying on the storefront screens of the Knight Foundation funded public art project called Virtual Street Corners, which seeks to break down the divide and distance between two very diverse communities with significant historical connections: Coolidge Corner in Brookline, and Dudley Square in Roxbury.
John Ewing, the Virtual Street Corner’s creator, noted in a PBS IDEAS Lab blog post:
“The Greater Boston neighborhoods of Brookline and Roxbury are 2.4 miles apart, yet there is little interaction between them because of divisions of race and class…It is my goal…to inspire or provoke people into having more involved conversations and exchanges. I’d even like to see people travel from one location to the other. Despite it being a 15-minute bus ride between these two neighborhoods, it is amazing how rarely this happens.”
Here’s a video version of the youths’ collective photo essay, entitled “Our Journey to the Corners,” also featured in an exhibit at the USES Harriett Tubman House in Roxbury, where they held their Saturday training sessions. All the photographs that appear in this short movie were captured by Peace in Focus youth participants, showing a mix of shots from Coolidge Corner on the left and Dudley Square on the right. The audio you hear is pulled from interviews the youth did with storeowners and randomly recorded during the bus rides.
Voices heard include:
Post by Danielle Martin.
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