Thursday, May 10, 2007

First VideoFunet conference in Finland

I am doing a "virtual" video closing keynote presentation at the first VideoFunet conference in Finland. My presentation is entitled, "Digital Stories and ePortfolios: Documenting Lifelong and LifeWide Learning." I put together a 48 minute video and a "How-To" page for this conference. If participants have any questions, add a comment to this blog entry.

2 comments:

Jari Miettinen said...

Good day,

It has been a week since we heard your presentation. It is said that certain slowness is a typical characteristic among the Finns so you may understand the delay. :^]

The time has not passed without thinking the content of your speech.

I noticed myself being produced digital storytelling material. Some years ago we made an Easter chicken story with my nephew. However, we used only digital photograps and text.

This brings us closer to the question which is: can you comment the use of the music a little bit further?

I'll write a few more words to open up the problem field as I see it.

The ability to record voice and combine that with digital images may be done more easily by say, non-literally oriented persons. To add music may be a pretty challenging task. In addition, there may be non-technical issues, e.g. copyrighting, which may complicate things further.

Thank you for your comment in advance.

Regards,

Jari Miettinen, CSC

eportfolios said...

Thanks for your comment. The issue of adding music to digital stories is a challenge, but one that really enhances the experience. I have several versions of the stories shown here. I tried to publish stories with only royalty-free music in this presentation, because I knew that it would be published on the Internet. But the original version of Dad had Glenn Miller music from World War II, which was copyrighted, and my Choices story used an Enya song. However, I made another version that I could publish on my CD and on the Internet. I found substitute music on FreePlayMusic.com. I have links to a lot of royalty-free music websites on the handout for this session. I also created the original version of my story Changes
in GarageBand (on the Macintosh) and used the loops that Apple provides for royalty-free use. So there are many ways to find music for digital stories. If a story is for personal use only, then I think it is OK to use commercial music. But the alternatives that I have shown can provide the desired effect without concerns for legalities.