Well, I finally got my “digital story” finished and posted online, using Scrapblog, an online, digital scrapbooking tool. I know more than a few people who are avid (or near avid) scrapbookers. I’ve never really understood the attraction – there’s always been something missing. Scrapblog might actually fill that hole by making it easier to share your work. It does lack the satisfaction of working with the pictures, paper, stickers and sundry other paraphenalia, but it sure is cheaper and easier to change your mind about where to place elements.
This activity was a learning experience for me – I had to learn to record audio using Audacity in order to create a mash-up in Picasa of photos and audio to upload to YouTube. Otherwise, there was no way for me to get an audio narration on my pages. I learned a bit more about Creative Commons licences from selecting photos on Flickr to use. One thing I would do differently next time, and may still do, is spend a bit more time cleaning up the audio. Even though all three audio clips were recorded in identical settings, with identical equipment, the sound quality varies quite a bit between the three.
What I learned from reviewing my classmates’ digital stories was that social media enables us to move from a starchy presentation of facts to a potentially compelling human story. When the story becomes meaningful to the author/creator, the information it conveys carries more weight with the audience. The ability of some platforms to incorporate audience response into the presentation itself raises the interactivity beyond “traditional” powerpoint presentations. [As a side-note, the death of powerpoint has been declared multiple times, at least as early as 2005, and most recently with the launching of Prezi, a much more dynamic tool. Yet, it’s still here with us. Why? Because it ships with MS Office…] Scrapblog operates as a weblog, in that viewers are welcome to leave comments on the presentation page, in the same way you (my reader) might see fit to leave a comment at the bottom of this page. Presentations that use original artwork or photos can also be much more compelling than those that use stock or pirated images.
That’s enough reflection for now…here’s the scrapblog I created, with much thanks to Karrie Emms who gave me permission to use her copyrighted story.
David
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