Digital Storytelling Festival

I am attending the Digital Storytelling Festival in Sedona. Yesterday was the first day, with a lot of "sit and get", although there was a lot of good information. Last night, they showed most of the digital stories created in the Digital Storytelling Bootcamp during the first three days of this week. This is the same workshop that Dan and I attended a year and a half ago in Berkeley, and where we interned last February. Dan and I were amazed last night at the number of family stories. Out of 22 stories, at least 15 used family pictures to recall memories about a grandmother, a father, grandfather a favorite dog... I overheard that the Apple rep. was amazed at the number of family stories. This experience just confirms our assumption that there is a lot of interest in this area.

This morning, the first presentation was on experiential learning, quoting the literature of Kolb, Friere, Lewin, Dewey, Piaget. It reminds me of the book that I have at home, but haven't read, on The Art of Changing the Brain, that ties brain biology with Kolb's experiential learning model. I find it interesting that this field of digital storytelling has a lot variability of definition, just as I find with electronic portfolios. What I would call a nice digital video editing project (but not a lot of story, i.e., voice) these presenters are calling digital stories. This is the same variability I see in models of electronic portfolios. Another term that has been conveniently adopted to describe a wide variety of implementation.