Clay's Blog

At the beginning of last week, I had the pleasure of participating in a workshop hosted by the Innovative Learning Center on Digital Storytelling. The workshop was led by two great facilitators from the Center for Digital Storytelling based in Berkeley, California. Daniel Weinshenker, the Director of the Denver Office, and Jessica McCoy, an instructor based at the Berkeley office, did a wonderful job leading the workshop. If you’re unfamiliar with Digital Storytelling, take a look at the Center’s website. Jessica is also involved with an organization called Stories for Change. Both websites host several amazing examples of digital stories.What I found most valuable in participating in the workshop was the opportunity to see a mature process for helping participants formulate and incrementally improve their stories in such a way that simply engaging in the process in good faith led to a product that was drastically better for having been through it. Participants were asked to come with a written script in the range of 350 words, or at least a set of notes that could be turned into a script. We were asked to gather together as much media as we could, such as pictures, video, sound recordings, and music, that would help to tell the story in more than words.
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