TechForum Chicago 2005

Joe Brennan and I had a nice experience presenting to a group of about 45 people on digital storytelling at TechForum 2005. Most were beginners to the process which was good, several individuals had used storytelling in conjunction with student portfolio work. Unfortunately, we lost about 15 minutes of the presentation to the roundtables finishing late. One of the things we didn't get to was a thorough discussion of ways to enlarge the presentation to begin building a learning community centered on digital storytelling. Many of us are beginning (and some have known for a while now) about the power of community as a learning environment. I really like the way Ebay describes it as "the power of all of us."

Let me explain some of the resources available to not only the people at the presentation, but anyone who reads this blog. First, presentation resources for the TechForum presentation are available at Jakesonline.org, as well as a specific collection of digital storytelling resources.

Additionally, anyone who is interested can subscribe to my digital storytelling feed from del.icio.us. If you are not familiar with del.icio.us, it's a social bookmarking Web site. Get an account, add your favorite Web sites, organize them by tags, and syndicate the list by using the RSS feed that the site produces for your Web links. If you are not familiar with social software such as del.icio.us and Furl, as well as RSS and tags, please read my very simple article about these tools.

Finally, there is an opportunity to contribute to StoryWiki, a set of Web pages constructed by collaborative thought. I've created several pages for various topics; these pages are for public view and public edit. That means anyone can edit the pages...go to StoryWiki, click on a topic and start adding your content or editing someone elses. It's the Web at its finest, complete collaborative Web page construction through a simple type and submit interface. A sideline-I would challenge you to try StoryWiki and think of creative ways to use Wikis with students-add those comments to the section of JakesWiki that focuses on Wiki ideas. By the way, my Wiki is published through EditMe and costs $4.95 per month-all that capability for less than I pay for a lunch. Amazing. Also, if interested, you can get a free Wiki at SeedWiki.com.

The Power of All of Us. Think about it. In Steve Dembo's posts of today at Teach42 about TechForum, Steve talks about having a room full of creative, intelligent people, who are being lectured to and are sitting as passive learners, certainly not 21st Century learning. Perhaps we can begin taking a first step towards changing/adding to conference effectiveness by contributing additional resources that serve to extend the conference and connect people and ideas in a way that helps individuals actually practice and become comfortable with 21st century open source thinking and learning.