21st February 2006

Bubbleshare of Climbing Popo

posted in digitalstorytelling, travel, web 2.0 |

At the suggestion of Cheryl Oakes, an innovative Maine educator I have never met face to face but corresponded with a few times via web 2.0 technologies, I have created my first Bubbleshare photostory this evening. Bubbleshare is a free website that lets anyone upload photos, similar to Flickr, but also record accompanying voice narration.

My first Bubbleshare “album” features images and narration of a climb I made in 1993 of the volcano Popocatepetl in Mexico. I posted about this last week after scanning and uploading about twenty pictures of that climb to Flickr. I talked about the experience of climbing a volcano with students in Room208 during an iChat videoconference last Monday, in response to their question “Where have you traveled before?” and thought it would be fun to share those images. Cheryl’s idea of using Bubbleshare is even better, since it includes voice narration!

This use of a web-based technology (read/write web technology) to create a still-image digital story reminds me of the Primary Access project coordinated by faculty and staff at the University of Virginia. The difference between Bubbleshare and Primary Access is that with Bubbleshare users have to actually upload their images to make narrated digital stories with them, and Bubbleshare does not presently support a “Ken Burns” pan effect during slideshows. Primary Access integrates with Flickr and other web-based image sources and just links to the pictures, rendering on-the-fly and not actually “copying” any image content from other locations on the web. Primary Access therefore offers an innovative way to deal with digital image copyright issues, since the images are not actually copied in any way during the slideshow, just dynamically linked and displayed.

I do like Microsoft’s free PhotoStory3 program, but resent the file incompatibility of the Windows Media Player files it exports by default with other computer platforms (like Macs). iPhoto and iMovie, part of iLife06 on Mac OS X, are still much more powerful and user-friendly I think compared to PhotoStory. But Bubbleshare has advantages over even these software tools, since it is free and web-based!

If you have created or know of other Bubbleshare digital stories that you’d like to share, please comment here and include links. I am going to post soon on the SITE Digital Storytelling blog about Bubbleshare, and would love to include some links to additional Bubbleshare examples. Thanks again to Cheryl for suggesting Bubblshare!

On this day..

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 21st, 2006 at 10:55 pm and is filed under digitalstorytelling, travel, web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

There are currently 6 responses to “Bubbleshare of Climbing Popo”

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  1. 1 On February 22nd, 2006, Bob Sprankle said:

    Awesome, Wes! I can’t wait to share your “bubble” with the students when they come back from Feb. vacation.

    Bob

  2. 2 On February 22nd, 2006, Cheryl Oakes said:

    Thanks Wes and I think the possibilities are great here for education. I too was disappointed when I couldn’t view Photostory from my PC friends. What is that all about? Enjoy. Now, have you heard of Springdoo? I am taking a Webhead in Action course, 6 week-online, and have learned a whole lot of new technologies from around the globe. It has been a blast!Cheryl

  3. 3 On February 22nd, 2006, Wesley Fryer said:

    Bob introduced me to Springdoo, and I think you had told him about it! So your Webhead in Action course is having a lot of ripple effects! :-) Do you have a social bookmark list of web 2.0 tools like this? I have a list on:

    http://del.icio.us/wfryer/ReadWriteWebTools

    If you are bookmarking these I would love to see your list too! :-)

  4. 4 On February 22nd, 2006, AHF said:

    Great! I don’t remember seeing these photos — but then it’s been 13 years. I do remember the event, tho. :) Since you didn’t have digital photos then, did you scan your pics, or were they slides? Is this “digital storytelling?”

  5. 5 On February 23rd, 2006, Cheryl Oakes said:

    The class is coming to an end this week and I will put together the whole list in del.icio.us.
    Thanks,
    Cheryl

  6. 6 On February 23rd, 2006, Wesley Fryer said:

    Yes, I had to scan these images from my old photo albums, which took awhile. I definitely think Bubbleshare with recorded narration qualifies as digital storytelling! :-)