Storytelling for a suncken landscape: Valle de Bravo, Mexico

I have just come back from spending 4 days in Valle de Bravo, in the State of Mexico. This is a wonderful village nestled amongst mountains and pine forests. The village has a beautiful lake, and our house, was just a short walk from the lake, where hundreds of ducks, water hens and several herons  waddled happily. The photograph of the lake was taken by Luck Mendez and he has wonderful images of Valle in his page.

Apparently, the area was flooded over 50 years ago to create a huge hydroelectric reservoir. I wished there had been back the possibility of digital storytelling to record the feelings of the people living back then, when their land was flooded and they were relocated. That area is now lost forever, and although what is now the "new" environment is lovely, I became nostalgic about a heritage of stories and memories that is slowly dying because it was not possible or noteworthy enough to record.

We often think that only important events are worth recording, and yet, this is no longer the case; with a video camera, some pictures and sound, anyone can make a story and publish it on the Internet. We can therefore all become digital storytellers, using our creativity to preserve our memories, our daily impressions and thoughts, and whatever strikes us as magical. On this vein, it is worth noting that there are several manuals available for digital storytelling. A recently updated one and freely available for downloading comes from the KQED Digital Storytelling Initiative.

Christmas is here

Well, here I am in sunny Mexico City thinking about storytelling and about the ways in which the story of Jesus' birth has been translated into different folkloric traditions. Here in my homeland, we celebrate the season with "posadas". The image on the right was taken in Colonia Roma, Villa Gustavo A. Madero, DF, Mexico by Esparta.

This is a party in which people re-enact the birth of Jesus by carrying images or little statues of Mary and Joseph around the street, (see the image on Flickr by the Catholic Sun)and singing specific carols until reaching a designated house. The carols are a dialogue where the people in the street ask the people inside the house for permission to enter, and the people inside come up with excuses, why nobody can come in just yet, just yet.... the signing goes on and on and it is quite ritualized, with set tunes, and questions and answers, until finally, one house, opens the door, everyone gets in and then there is a grand party with the children breaking a pinata...
( a claypot, decorated into traditional images, like stars, or the sun, and filled with fruit and candy). The image of these wonderful star-shaped pinatas was taken by El Sol.

I have gotten quite sentimental thinking about this type of celebrations since I went every year until my 21st, to these parties and loved it. Sometimes I was part of the people singing outside the house, and other times, inside their house, readying everything to welcome the Holy family into our home. Feliz Navidad!

The Storyline approach and On-line learning design

The Storyline approach was developed by Steve Bell, Sallie Harkness and Fred Rendell some years ago at the Department of Education of the University of Strathclyde in Scotland. It places the teacher as a facilitator who designs learning opportunities using the wealth of information resources available within the context of a story. Learners develop their own learning, both through guided group-work and independent research. The groups get together with the results of their research and collectively construct a story. The thread that links the research and the learning is in fact the development of a story. This is powerful stuff. The learning is entirely self-motivated and the system encourages the development of information gathering and processing skills. In other words it is a system that promotes information literacy skills. The Storyline approach has been actively proposed by Teaching and Learning Scotland and is gradually being introduced throughout the land from pre-primary unto secondary school.

Another interesting thing about this approach is that it is extremely similar to the educational design underpinning the development of online learning where the design team constructs learning opportunities that encourage self-learning through independent inquiry. Discussion boards are then used to share results of research and to develop the learning of the group as a whole. The groups are motivated through the construction of a story. An example of such an implementation can be seen in the Hospiweb Project where students from 2 universities were asked to develop an investment strategy for a new business hotel venture in Scotland. each team was therefore constructing the story of their own imaginary business venture. The parallels with Sotryline are amazing, becuase within the Hospiweb Porject, we had parents contacting the team, inquiring whether their sons and daughters were indeed asked to create a business venture for real. there was excitement and awe combined with fear...

This is yet another application of storytelling. Who would have thought of storytelling entering the corporate world...? and yet, we have all encountered with a sense of amazement the stories of innovators and business men who against all odds, followed their dreams, and found riches, fame and glory for themselves and their countries.... the images are indeed mythical . Have a look at the stories of Akio Morita, the founder of the Sony Corporation, or the Asa Griggs Candler, the founder of CocaCola or Ray Krok the founder of McDonalds. They are all recounted using the macro-structure of children's folk stories.
What a wonder, that we never are tired of listening to stories.

Why do computer games have weak stories?

Some years ago, I began to read that parents were really scared that children would spend all their time playing computer games and would lose out on the fun things of childhood, like playing in a park, doing sports, mucking about with paints and mud, or, yes, you guessed it... reading a book or listening/inventing to a story. As it turns out, research has pointed out that out children are in fact quite actively pursuing what interest them, and that on average, they are not spending an inordinate amount of time playing computer games. In fact, most very young children spend quite a bit of their time engaged in fantasy play where they are, yes, indeed, inventing and acting out stories.

It must be a sign of ageism, because I love computers and digital technology but fail to get totally captivated by computer games. Probably because the plots are mostly predictable and in many cases violent. Jesper Julles at the Digital Arts and Culture Conference in Norway in 1998 made a direct comparison between computer games and stories. I am quoting verbatim from his full presentation which you can read here. He came up with this neat comparison table..

"This leads us to a final comparison of the relationship between narratives and computer games:

Narratives	Computer games
Fixed sequence	Flexible sequence
Variable speed (usually compressed)	Fixed speed
Story/discourse	Program/material
Past	Present
Needs human or anthropomorphic actors	Can be abstract
Narrative desire	Desire for understanding & performance
Consume once	Play many times

• Narratives are fixed sequences, games are flexible sequences.
• Narratives vary in the speed with which they are told; uninteresting periods of time are skipped; the movie 48 hours doesn't last 48 hours. Computer games, especially the action game, are fixed speed, real time.
• A narrative has a dualism between the story and the discourse, the computer game is divided between the formal program and the material.
• A narrative is basically something past, a computer game something present.
• A narrative needs human or anthropomorphic actors, a game can be abstract. You can’t imagine a narrative as abstract as Tetris.
• In a narrative, the reader desires to know the ending. In a game, the player wants to understand the structure of the game and to acquire the skills to use this knowledge.
• A narrative is something you consume once, a game is something you play many times.

To sum it up. Computer games and narratives are very different phenomena. Two phenomena that fight each other. Two phenomena that you basically cannot have at the same time. Any interactive narrative or attempt at interactive storytelling is a zigzag between these two columns".

I liked his comparison table very much and mostly agree with his premises, but I do not think that a narrative is always something in the past. In storytelling, the teller is indeed recounting a past event, but everytime the story is told, even by the same person, the story metamorphoses a little and it is never the same. In this case, the story is always present and never in the past. Even narratives recorded in books, are not quite static because the reader absorbs different elements of the narrative and therefore transforms it in his or her own mind. whenever I read, I never absorb everything; my mind takes what I can absorb, disregards what I cannot comprehend and discards what is trivial to my state of mind although, maybe what I have discarded is curcially important to the author. This happened to me once, when I was giving a lecture in Colombia and a person waited until coffee time to discuss line by line one of my papers. He had read into my work, much more depth than what I had originally intended. The text is there, immobile and fixed, but the mind of the reader assigns depth and meaning completely out of the control of the author of the text. This is why I beleive firmly that a printed narrative is as fluid as a story germinating in the imagination of a listener.

Storytelling as an organisational medium for information

I was a former librarian. Perhaps it is therefore not surprising that something about storytelling immediately captivated my imagination. It was not just the plots, and the characters and the voices and the acting, there is something deeply satisfying in identifying the key characteristics of a story and organising them in your mind without the need to commit each element of the story to our minds. The skeleton of the story is what should be remembered, we can then clothe the story with different minutiae as we go along... in this case, each time we tell a story it is fresh, and slightly different, because our, audiences, our voices, our imagination and our feelings will be different each time. There is real beauty in this, because, in a sense, each storyteller is a little bit like a virtuoso improviser, with an outline to guide the heart and the voice. Dr. Sturm from the University of Carolina at Chapel Hill has researched some of the organisational principles behind storytelling as a mechanism to store and retrieve information to memory and I find his presentation in YouTube fascinating. Dr Sturm is also researching the trance-like state hat people experience when listening to stories. I am particularly interested in this because sometimes, some of the children in the audience can be really captivated and attentive to the sotry unfolding in their imagination, through my voice and actions. His article on trance and storytelling is really fascinating.

Training the Voice

It has taken me a while to realize that the voice is an instrument, and the words within the story are the music which a storyteller brings to life. I attended a workshop called "Training the Voice" at the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh and it was quite clear that I had never felt or tasted words for the music within them. It was a very interesting workshop because a number of the participants were not native English speakers, but Norwegians students of drama; the workshop leader was very quick to get everyone into doing physical exercises with which to relax our bodies and our voices. I enjoyed the workshop very much, since we had to act, improvise and develop the strength of our voices using our diaphragms. It reminded me of the times when I was a singer at the Convivium Musicum in Mexico City singing at the Palace of Fine Arts.

Comic Life

I have been trying to work on Comic Life to show everyone how easy it is to create a comic out of a series of photographs. I spent a bit of time choosing the layout but after that it was relatively simple stuff. I will show it to the children since they are the main characters in the comic about the rise and shine of DigiStory. I could only upload the comic as a film for the blog but within the comi Life software it is possible to print it directly.

Training, training and more training

Last month we were very busy training new volunteers for the next batch of storytelling sessions. We did training on storytelling techniques as well as on the ethics of being a volunteer at St. Andrew's. It is the first time that we were able to conduct formal training with our local volunteers and it was a very fruitful experience for everyone involved. We hope to be able to get more volunteers involved as we intend to increase the number of storytelling sessions for 2009.

The training should be done at regular intervals so that people can have a chance to increase their skills on a regular basis. I hope to be able to develop my own skills further so that I can train volunteers more fully into crafting stories and voicing stories. This is something that interests me very much. Particularly how to attract the children's attention by incorporating a number of elements from their own environments. This is an area that is mentioned in a recent article by Jeremy Hsu where he explores why it is that we are fascinated by stories. His article looks at why we love a good yarn. This is one article I recommend to everyone training as a volunteer in DigiStory. It certainly inspires discussion.

Another area of training will definitely be in using Comic Life which is a software that allows children to change their photographs into a comic-strip. Older children love to be given a camera and then upload their photos to the computer to create their own comics. I anticipate much more interest in this in the future.

DigiStory presentation for local teachers

Last month we were invited to give a presentation on the concept of DigiStory to teachers within Falkirk Council. We were very excited by this opportunity to work with teachers within our area. I did an hour of presentations and then tackled some questions. We were fortunate to be able to count with the cooperation of the Educational Services in Falkirk. Hopefully we will be able to run storytelling sessions in schools in the near future.

DigiStory in the local Press

The word has gotten around about our storytelling club and a local reporter did a news feature before the end of the year. The children were really excited and sometimes were almost posing for the photographer but in the end everything went very well. The last session for this year of 2008 was a story from Norway which was translated by Andrea Wollard. The story is about three trees that want to go and visit the new king who has just been born. The children really enjoyed it because the trees were producing fruits that they would give as gifts to the new baby king, and the fruits were dates and olives. We had some tasters of both and it went really really well.

The DigiStory Blog. or Hello World!

This is a blog dedicated to digital storytelling. I intend to speak about my experiences in storytelling, interesting storytellers I meet and techniques I have used with children learning to tell and illustrate their own stories.

I started being interested in storytelling about 3 years ago and thanks to some work I had been doing as part of the World without Walls team in St Andrew's Parish Church in Bo'ness, Scotland I was able to explore the concepts of digital storytelling more fully. We were able to run a pilot project where with the help of a professional storyteller, Michael Williams, we managed to train around 12 people in digital storytelling. This is how the adventure started and we have never stopped.

We are currently running storytelling sessions quite regularly for 4 blocks of 6 session each during the year. The sessions explore different topics, such as healthy eating, global citizenship, environmental issues and citizenship. However, the children that come to our session, just come to have fun. We have children from 5-12 years old for 1 1/2 hours a week. During this time, we hear stories, play games, learn tonguetwisters, draw, film and have lots of fun. Check out some of the pictures form our most recent sessions.