New Orleans Trip
On March 12th, I will be joining twelve other ITP students and Shawn Van Every, Marianne Petit and former student Jeff Gray, to travel to New Orleans as part of the Digital Storytelling grant and collaboration with Xavier University. In preparation for this trip I have been talking to Yonatan Kelib, fellow freeformed collaborator and someone who is also doing his thesis in the realm of mobile phones and blogging, about possible implementations of projects using the phone. Many of the ideas discussed in the planning meeting of all of the participants today centered around the possibility digital video and audio, doing workshops on how to execute both and upload them to an online forum. Of course this is important. But I am much more interested in teaching things that don't require large amounts of teaching. Not because I think it is more important, but just that it could be readily available to anyone. Yonatan and I have discussed, in addition to the further user testing of the actual freeformed site, creating an entirely asterisk based system that would allow people to simply call a number a tell their story, with as much contextual information as they wish to leave. We plan to incorporate these messages into an open freeformed circle, no registration, no need to actually view anything online. The media files would also be posted to a blog that Yonatan will create for his research.. We hope that other people who join the online component of the site will then visit this circle, listen to the stories and apply their own pictures or video to them via media comments. I think it will be an interesting experiment.
Both of us of course intend to document as much as we can. I will be bringing my Nikon D80 for sure, as well as two mobile phones with different service plans. More about this as it gets closer....