Speaking up!

After telling myself for 2 years that I would present a talk at the next Ignite get-together, I finally did it last night.

Speaking to large numbers of people is not my favourite thing, although who you are speaking to makes a huge difference in how confident you might feel. And as this was not in a lecture theatre, or to other students and academics, I was extra concerned that my talk might be far too dull or disconnected to be worthwhile. It’s quite hard to pitch to an unknown audience – many of whom may already know your subject inside out!

The format for Ignite is 20 slides, auto-advancing every 15 seconds thereby taking exactly 5 minutes to compete the talk. The speakers normally present a range of subjects, but there is usually a common theme of the digital world.

Here are my slides – keywords and thoughts on an already very edited insight into digital storytelling to fit with the Ignite format.

Digital Storytelling

View more presentations from XarahC

Using Media for Social Change

Since I last blogged 3 months ago so many things have happened to help set me on a path for future work. I’ve been fortunate enough to have funding to attend attend a conference on Digital Storytelling, hosted by the Center for Digital Storytelling in partnership with the Luso-American foundation in Portugal, and a week long International School for Digital Transformation, also in Portugal. I have also started my community fieldwork case studies and completed my classroom based case studies.

In each of these, I have met some inspiration people who have helped me to see the world in a slightly different way. Rather than gazing with terror at how badly broken our social structures are, I can see the cracks and in some cases how issues are intertwined and form the cracks, but also tiny little bridges starting to appear over them.

This video was just tweeted by one of the inspirational faculty members I met at ISDT09, and it represents one of those bridges. “Playing for Change” shows how music crosses cultural boundaries so beautifully and how technology facilitates such collaborations. And it is a really enjoyable way of spending 5 minutes.