Moving at the Speed of Creativity

What is this? A videoconference scheduled for 11 November 2008 from 9 - 11:30 am CST for students, teachers, and U.S. military veterans to share their experiences as participants in the Celebrate Oklahoma Voices project. Presenters will be past and current participants in the COV oral history project or similar oral history projects. Participants do NOT have to have any prior experiences with Veteran oral history interviews. This is a great opportunity to recognize military veterans and learn more about their sacrifices and experiences on the day our nation celebrates Veteran’s Day.

Who can participate? Any K-20 school is welcome to participate, but priority will be given to Oklahoma schools if we receive large numbers of requests. We anticipate connecting 6-8 schools via H.323 videoconferencing equipment and a maximum of 30-40 schools via a webcast/webstream.

Who is organizing and sponsoring this event? The Oklahoma Heritage Association is the lead partner of the Celebrate Oklahoma Voices project and is facilitating this event in cooperation with Tandberg and project participants.

How can our school submit a participation request? Complete our online Google form. The form will remain open through October 31st, but we anticipate making selections for sites by October 23rd, so please submit it as soon as possible.

More information about this event is available on this published Google Document as well as in a PDF file. Please forward this information to other educators who may be interested in this videoconference/webcast learning opportunity.

If you have questions and comments you can also add these to the forum announcement post on our learning community website.

Technorati Tags:
oklahoma, veteran, military, videoconference, school, learning, celebration, cov, cov08

As you may know, the first U.S. Presidential debate of the 2008 campaign is scheduled for this evening (September 26, 2008) at 8 pm CDT. Here in Oklahoma, our public television network (OETA) has created the Oklahoma Votes 2008 website to provide dynamic election coverage. One of the site’s resources is the Political Pulse blog, authored by Dick Pryor. The blog has the tagline “Unbiased Information on Oklahoma Politics.”

I got to know Dick last December when we were both part of a team sent to Hawaii to facilitate a videoconference with USS Oklahoma veteran survivors from Ford Island in Pearl Harbor. I really enjoyed the opportunity to not only work with Dick but also learn from him as a veteran journalist in both radio and television.

In his most recent entry on The Political Pulse, “Debate Prep Resource,” Dick linked to Frank Baker and Karen Zil’s outstanding website “Lights, Camera, Debate!” which provides resources to use in advance and following the Presidential debates. The website focuses on:

How to watch the presidential debates from a media-literacy perspective.

This is a great collection of resources. What a super time to focus on media literacy!

As a related aside, OETA’s Oklahoma World War II Veterans Project won the Emmy Award for Community Service at the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Heartland Emmy Awards Presentation on July 19, 2008. Resources still available related to this project include the Oklahoma World War II Stories project website, and the WetPaint wiki we used for educational digital learning projects related to our December 6, 2007, videoconference from Pearl Harbor. The Veteran Interview guide on the OETA website (PDF format) is one resource we continue to use for our ongoing Celebrate Oklahoma Voices oral history project.

Whether or not you’re an Oklahoman, I commend both the Oklahoma Votes 2008 website and Dick’s Political Pulse blog as great resources to utilize in the classroom and at home as we watch and participate in the unfolding elections this fall at local, state and national levels.

Technorati Tags:
election, oklahoma, oeta, politics, pulse, blog, debate, presidential, president, education, classroom, socialstudies

Thanks to Nik Peachey’s post last week about Virsona, I had a short text chat with an AI version of Abraham Lincoln this afternoon.

This was our brief conversation:

Abraham Lincoln: Hi.
You: hello
Abraham Lincoln: who are you?
You: I am a teacher
Abraham Lincoln: Nice to meet you.
You: Why did we fight the civil war?
Abraham Lincoln: A profound sadness to see the Union ripped apart and brother set at brother. Did it make you sad too?
You: Of course. What were the REASONS for the war?
Abraham Lincoln: I understand. Short answer is for political reasons. To expand on that, in spite of the fact that the Battle of Gettysburg was a Union victory, it was also the bloodiest battle of the war and dealt a blow to my war efforts and the public’’s ongoing support for the war. At the dedication of the Soldiers” National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on 19 November, in my now iconic speech, I referred to the events of the Civil War and described the ceremony at Gettysburg as an opportunity not only to dedicate the grounds of a cemetery, but also to consecrate the living in the struggle to ensure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” I asked, what would these men who died for this cause want us to do–quit now or finish the job?
You: That was kind of a long answer. I am a slow reader today.
Abraham Lincoln: I was at the Ford’s Theatre watching one of my favorite plays, ‘Our American Cousin,’ when I was shot by Booth. Nice to meet you.

This site and concept is intriguing to me from the perspective of an educational prosumer. Students and teachers are not just limited to interacting with the existing AI characters on the site, but are also able to CREATE their own and further develop (teach) existing characters on the site. According to the Virsona website:

Virsonas are “Virtual Personas,” created to Reason, Remember and React in the same way that a living, fictional or historical person would. You can create the “Virtual You” as a Personal Virsona™ or you can create and / or interact with one of our Community Virsonas. Interacting with our Community Virsonas opens up a world of possibility - you can actually talk directly to one of your heroes, conduct research or simply have FUN! You can also create Virsonas of departed loved ones, your pet(s), as well as for commonly shared experiences, for example; “The First Kiss.”

Our Virsonas don’t know the answers to everything, but they are capable and willing to learn. As part of the Virsona Community, you can participate in “educating” them using the “Teach” button. So, if you chat with a Virsona and it doesn’t know the answer, simply create your free account, and you can begin to “teach” it by simply inputting the correct answers! That’s the beauty of a Community; participation, sharing and learning.

This can take historical role-playing and re-enacting to another level. As I develop the post-field trip extension activity ideas for the Oklahoma Heritage Association and Gaylord-Pickens Museum, websites like this provide food for thought and new tools for engaged learning. How interesting to think that students could actually “teach” an AI historical character based on the things they’ve studied and learned about that person. What LoTi level would that learning task be assigned?

It would be cool if historical Virsonas could co-exist in Second Life to intelligently interact with others. I’m sure functionality similar to that is coming soon to a virtual world near you.

Technorati Tags:
history, ai, virsona, virtal, character, loti, education, technology

Our family had a great time this afternoon at the annual Septemberfest event sponsored by the Oklahoma History Center. Here are a few of the highlights I caught with my camera.

My favorite moments of the day were listening to cowboy re-enactor Whit Edwards tell about life for the cowboys working on the great plains following the U.S. Civil War until the open range closed in the early 1890s.

We learned that cowboys had two kinds of rope which were best used in different conditions. Grass rope worked better in wet conditions but could break when it was dry. Rawhide ropes, like the one shown below, were less desirable to use in wet conditions because they would stretch out and could break. Rawhide ropes could hold strong when dry, however.

I hadn’t realized that cattle drives in the late 1800s had to keep going farther west because eventually townspeople hired marshals who refused to let the cowboys bring their cattle and wild ways into their towns. This coin from a Dodge City brothel listed prices for some of the offered services for cowboys, which were among the economic pursuits generally unwanted by towns folk:

It’s always a treat to get to see the cowboy’s tools of the trade up close.

We even got to see a demonstration of whip cracking!

Medicine has certainly come a long way in a short time. Many times nervine like this contained little more than alcohol and cocaine, and couldn’t actually “heal” any ailments.

Since moving to Oklahoma in 2006 I’ve heard a little about the Pawnee Bill Wild West Show, but hadn’t until today known that Pawnee Bill was at one time teamed up with Buffalo Bill Cody. Evidently Pawnee Bill was a better businessman than Wild Bill, who (according to the cowboy historian who was telling us this story) was better at spending money than managing it. Since my dad grew up in Powell, Wyoming, near Cody, we used to visit the fantastic Buffalo Bill Historical Center every few years. I never heard of Pawnee Bill growing up, however.

Wayne Spears has played the part of Pawnee Bill in the show’s annual re-enactment in June in Pawnee, Oklahoma, but this summer was his last in the lead role. Today he was leading horse rides at Septemberfest:

I hope next June our family will be able to see the Pawnee Bill Wild West Show for the first time!

I was glad to learn today what a beaver skull looks like, because I found a skull just like this when I was going to college in Colorado and had it tied to the front of my Jeep Wrangler for years. I still have it somewhere in our garage, but I was never sure in the past what type of animal it had been. Now I know!

Chris Capstone amazed us all with his magic show. I was particularly impressed with his rope tricks!

The highlight of the day for my wife was being able to tour the mansion of the Oklahoma governor and his family. The governor’s mansion is right across the street (23rd street) from the History Center. We were even able to speak briefly to the first lady, Kim Henry, when we were touring the second floor of their beautiful home!

I’m not sure if this was the most memorable moment of the day or not, but it’s likely Rachel won’t soon forget milking (only briefly) a cow for the first time!

What a fun day of hands-on learning! Many thanks to all the volunteers and the Oklahoma History Center staff for putting on this wonderful, free event for the citizens of Oklahoma!

I am considering finding a historical character from Oklahoma and working on becoming a character actor myself in upcoming months. Character actors certainly can bring history alive in ways textbooks and even films cannot.

I always have wanted an excuse to legitimately wear and carry a Colt Peacemaker. Perhaps as a character actor hobbyist this dream can finally come true.

Technorati Tags:
history, oklahoma, septemberfest, cowboy, governor, mansion

I’m working on creating a curriculum DVD for the Gaylord-Pickens Museum of the Oklahoma Heritage Association, which will be shared with teachers and students before they come to the museum for face-to-face field trips this fall and spring. Thanks to grants from the Dell Foundation and the Inasmuch Foundation free field trips for hundreds of Oklahoma K-12 students are available during the 2008-2009 school year. We (the OHA) have the copyright / intellectual property rights to the DVD content I am working with: professionally mastered DVDs of past Oklahoma Hall of Fame induction ceremonies. Previously these videos or excerpts of these videos have not been available on the open web. I am going to include the short, 4-5 minute digital stories about the lives and contributions of 2007 inductees on our curriculum DVD, and will also publish these on the new OHAcast video and audio podcast channel I’m creating. We hope to launch that formally after Labor Day in early September.

My challenge and questions for this post focus on the best way to extract full-quality DVD video and audio from these Hall of Fame DVDs which I can then edit, compress, and publish using Final Cut Studio Pro. Currently I am using Snapz Pro X to create almost 30 fps full-size (720×480) QuickTime video clips of these short digital biographies which were shared during the 2007 Hall of Fame ceremony.

This is representative of the video quality I’m capturing now with Snapz Pro X:

This method of capturing video clips from the DVD is working fine, but I’m wondering if there are other ways that might be more efficient or preferable for some reason? I thought about using Handbrake software (free and cross-platform, btw) to extract the entire DVD video and then use Final Cut to mark and produce the segments I want. Handbrake, however, is really made to extract and compress video to play it on mobile devices like iPods and iPhones. Someone suggested I use Toast to extract the video from DVDs so I can work with it, but I’m wondering if Popcorn would be better suited for this? It’s been several years since I’ve used Toast, and that was just to burn CDs and DVDs. I’ve never used Toast to rip DVDs, just Handbrake. WikiHow suggests using DVD Decrypter, but apparently that software is no longer officially available. I’m not sure but I suspect DVD Decrypter is Windows-only softare. LifeHacker references Wired Magazine’s how-to wiki entry about copying DVDs which recommends using free MacTheRipper software. I haven’t used that program either but may give it a try.

Do you have any suggestions or insights on software tools that can be used to capture DVD footage (particularly in this case short clips) and then readily edit it in Final Cut?

Technorati Tags:
dvd, rip, extract, video, fcp, finalcut, finalcutpro, edit, curriculum, oklahoma, history, heritage, fieldtrip, school

My knowledge of Liberia has been pretty limited to date. I learned about the Liberian Renaissance Education Complex talking to Dr. Dennis Harper (founder of Kijana Voices and Generation YES) at NECC in 2007 as part of a podcast interview. Before our conversation I had not heard of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the current president of Liberia and the first female to be elected as a head of state on the continent of Africa. I vaguely identified Liberia as a nation in west Africa, but did not realize until very recently it had been in the throes of a civil war which started in 1989. I was also ignorant of Liberia’s history as a country founded as a prospective home for U.S. slaves reversing the middle passage and returning to Africa. According to today’s English WikiPedia’s article for Liberia:

In 1822, the American Colonization Society established Liberia as a place to send black people who were formerly enslaved. Other African Americans, who were never enslaved, chose to emigrate to Liberia as well. African-Americans gradually migrated to the colony and became known as Americo-Liberians, from where many present day Liberians trace their ancestry. On July 26, 1847, the Americo-Liberian settlers declared the independence of the Republic of Liberia.

Some time ago I was invited to the Facebook group for the movie “Pray the Devil Back to Hell.” At the time, I did not realize the group focused on a movie about an important recent chapter of Liberian history. According to the film’s official website:

Pray the Devil Back to Hell chronicles the remarkable story of the courageous Liberian women who came together to end a bloody civil war and bring peace to their shattered country.

Thousands of women - ordinary mothers, grandmothers, aunts and daughters, both Christian and Muslim - came together to pray for peace and then staged a silent protest outside of the Presidential palace. Armed only with white T-shirts and the courage of their convictions, they look on the warlords and nonviolently forced a resolution during the stalled peace talks.

A story of sacrifice, unity and transcendence, Pray the Devil Back to Hell honors the strength and perseverance of the women of Liberia. Inspiring, uplifting and most of all motivating, it is a compelling testimony of how grassroots activism can alter the history of nations.

Consider bringing a screening of the film to your local community.

After last week’s celebration events commemorating the life and achievements of Clara Luper who helped lead the nonviolent Oklahoma City Sit-ins in 1958, I have been thinking more about civil rights activism.

It is telling and unfortunate that the WikiPedia article for the African-American Civil Rights Movement is titled with the inclusive dates, 1955–1968. This struggle is not over in the United States or around the world.

NetFlix has the film listed in their database but the page does not show a DVD release date. The film summary from NetFlix is:

Director Virginia Reticker’s documentary tells the story of the thousands of Liberian women who helped end the bloody late-1990s civil war that killed 250,000 people, allegedly supported in secret by then-President Charles Taylor. Through nonviolent protests, the Christian Women’s Peace Initiative forced a resolution in the peace talks, and their efforts led to the election of Africa’s first female head of state, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.

I hope I’ll have a chance to this film about Liberian peace and human rights activists soon. Stories of courage and struggles like these certainly put the relatively minor challenges I face in my own life in stark perspective.

Technorati Tags:
liberia, humanrights, war, civil, civilwar, history, protest, nonviolent, nonviolence, sirleaf

I love railroads.

Had I lived in a bygone era, I feel certain I would have been drawn to work around or on railroads when they were the primary “connecting technology” which brought people together and made geographic places seem far closer. I’ve reflected several times in the past on the similarities between physical railroads and the virtual connections which we ride and build to connect our thoughts together in the Internet aether. My 4th podcast in August 2005 titled “Trails, Trains, and T-1s,” my November 2005 post “The flat world is real,” and my May 2007 video “Roads of Learning in the 21st Century” are all past examples of this metaphor in my thinking about education, learning, technology and change. I uploaded that May 2007 15 minute video to blip.tv this evening, since I had not uploaded it to any video sharing websites at the time I created it.

Two weeks ago our family had an opportunity to attend the XIT Rodeo and Reunion in Dalhart, Texas. The father of my father-in-law (I’m not sure what official family title that should give him) was a pipe fitter with the Union Pacific Railroad in Dalhart.

Dalhart was a major railroad hub as two different lines met there, and a roundhouse was in Dalhart where trains were repaired. Interestingly, the current WikiPedia article for Dalhart does not make any mention of its railroading past. We found the original location of the Dalhart roundhouse when we were there visiting.

The building is gone and some rails remain. Evidently as train technology switched from coal burning to diesel engines, the repair house at Dalhart was no longer needed and trains were fixed in Chicago.

Whether you are teaching in the northern hemisphere and either starting or preparing to start a new school year, or teaching in the southern hemisphere and already in the midst of your winter term, I think it is worthwhile to consider how many different pathways of learning our students have today in our classrooms. Like the following photo of railroad lines in Dalhart, I believe our students should have many choices for their “learning tracks” in school.

In traditional classrooms, as David Warlick pointed out in his pre-conference keynote for the 2006 K-12 Online Conference “Derailing Education: Taking Sidetrips for Learning,” teachers don’t give students many choices. Students tend to all be seated in identical desks, facing the same direction, and doing the same thing. My oldest two children started the 2008-2009 school year today here in Oklahoma public schools, and to a large extent their learning experiences tend to follow the same, traditional models of the past. Here are a few questions I’m asking myself as I prepare curriculum and work with both teachers and students in Oklahoma this year on oral history and digital storytelling projects, which relate to these ideas about railroads and learning.

1. THE ROUNDHOUSE OF PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

The roundhouse was a place where trains could be repaired, obtain new equipment, get turned around if necessary, and undergo other preparations for the grueling challenges of cross-country rail lines. How are we providing REGULAR and SUSTAINED opportunities for our teachers to come into a “learning roundhouse” for new ideas, recharged enthusiasm, and encouragement from peers? Consider utilizing content and connection opportunities from the free October 2008 K-12 Online Conference in your local “roundhouse of professional development.”

2. MULTIPLE TRACKS OF DIFFERENTIATED ASSESSMENT

Here in the United States, our policymakers continue to focus our attention on end-of-year summative assessments as well as end-of-course examinations. The purposes of the time we spend in formal educational classroom settings go far beyond simple test preparation, however. As Dr. Pedro Noguera stated in his BLC08 keynote, if special education worked as it was designed every parent would want their child in a special education program with an individualized education plan designed to meet the specific needs of their child. Each learner IS different, and to the greatest degree possible as educators we should strive to provide differentiated learning experiences for our students. Differentiated learning does not simply mean different ways to explore and consume content, it also means DIFFERENTIATED ASSESSMENT as learners are provided with choices about the ways they demonstrate their mastery and understanding of knowledge and skills. Technology tools like voice recorders as well as websites permitting audio recording over the phone (like Gabcast and Gcast) can be used in powerful ways to provide learners with multiple “tracks” of assessment choices.

3. BUILD VIRTUAL CONNECTIONS TO OTHER LEARNERS

Every lesson you teach this year cannot necessarily have a digitally interactive component, but set goals now to build virtual connections to other learners in other places which you’ll be able to “ride” and on which you can make multiple connections during the coming months. Utilize online learning communities for educators like Classroom 2.0, the Global Education Collaborative, ePals, the CILC, the K-12 Online Conference, and StoryChasers to make safe, asynchronous initial connections with other teachers via email and later synchronous connections via videoconferencing.

It’s a big world out there, and it’s always been a big world, but the virtual connections we build to each other with digital tools can and do make it seem like a much smaller world all the time.

Last piece of advice for this post: Add a free ClustrMap to your classroom website this year if you have not already. As you make virtual connections with other learners across the country and around the world, invite your students to watch the digital footprint of your classroom learning community grow. It’s a small world after all.

Technorati Tags:
railroad, classroom, connection, learning, collaboration, technology, digital, advice, virtual, videoconferencing, k12online08

This podcast is a recorded interview with Nancy Coggins, Marketing and Communications Director for the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum, discussing the new cell phone audio tour which museum staff have made available for the past two months. The Memorial and Museum’s video podcast virtual tour has won national recognition in the past and remains available on the official website. As Nancy relates, however, many visitors to the memorial come sponataneously and may not have had a prior opportunity to download a video podcast and sync it to their iPod or iPhone. By providing a cell phone walking tour, memorial and museum staff are facilitating greater access to a richer, guided experience as visitors come to Oklahoma City. This cell phone audio tour was made possible thanks to a generous grant from the AT&T Foundation. I am enthused about the possiblities which new media initiatives like this one present not only for people who come to the memorial and museum face-to-face, but also for students and teachers in other locations who can potentially be empowered to create virtual field trips and cell phone tours about areas of local interest in their community. Many thanks to Nancy for sharing these thoughts and reflections. Links to educational curriculum and resources related to terrorism, violence prevention, and the educational outreach activities of the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum are available in the podcast shownotes.

 

 Podcast272: A Conversation about the Cell Phone Audio Tour at the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum [29:20m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (3798)

Show Notes:

1. Official website of the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum
2. Oklahoma City National Memorial  and Museum (U.S. National Park Service site)
3. Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum now offering cell phone tour (NewsOK - 25 July 2008)
4. Cell phone can talk visitors through tour (NewsOK - 26 July 2008)
5. Museums receive grants to add technology (NewsOK - 2 April 2008)
6. Podcast241: 100K of New AT&T Foundation Grant Funding for Oklahoma Digital Storytellers, Museums and Memorials
7. OnCellSystems (the company providing the cell phone guided tour service for the OKC Memorial and Museum)
8. Guide by Cell - cell phone audio tours for your institution (another company considered but not selected by the OKC Memorial and Museum)
9. AT&T Foundation
10. Oklahoma City bombing article on WikiPedia

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Technorati Tags: oklahoma, oklahomacity, memorial, museum, national, bombing, murrah, tour, virtualtour, cell, cellphone, mobile

In line with the spirit of the developing Storychasers project, I’ve created a six minute documentary about yesterday’s free community barbeque in Dalhart, Texas, offered as part of the festivities for the annual XIT Rodeo. As they have for the past 72 years, community volunteers prepared nine thousand pounds of barbeque meat with all the fixins’ to feed a crowd of twenty thousand which converged on this small, west Texas town for a special weekend of great food, good times and outstanding rodeo action.

I’ve also uploaded 150 pictures and almost 50 shorter video clips to Flickr about the XIT Rodeo and barbeque.

On the subject of barbeque, you might also check out my favorite episode from NPR’s “This I Believe” show and podcast titled, “There Is No Such Thing as Too Much Barbecue.” I have to say that after yesterday’s experiences at the XIT barbeque, I believe in barbeque myself more than ever!
I recorded a thirty minute interview with my mother-in-law yesterday sharing her remembrances of XIT and growing in Dalhart, Texas, which I will also edit and publish soon. Learn more about the XIT Rodeo and Reunion on the event’s official website, the XIT Museum’s website, and on the WikiPedia entry for XIT Ranch. My post from Friday night, “Storychasing the 2008 XIT Rodeo and Ranch” also provides some additional background.

Mmmmm, I’m hungry for more barbeque already!

Technorati Tags:
xit, ranch, barbeque, barbecue, bbq, texas, community, tradition, free, dalhart, history, heritage, story, storytelling, digitalstorytelling

Our family is in Dalhart, Texas, this weekend for the annual XIT Rodeo.

My in-laws are from Dalhart and are attending their 50th high school reunion, in addition to the XIT Rodeo which triples the population of Dalhart each year during this single weekend. According to the “Thumbnail History of the XIT Ranch” from the XIT Museum website:

The XIT Ranch in the 1880s was the largest range in the world under fence and it all laid in the Texas Panhandle. It’s three million acres sprawled from the old Yellow House headquarters, near what is now Lubbock, Texas, northward to the Oklahoma Panhandle, in an irregular strip that was roughly 30 miles wide.

It covered portions of ten counties which apparently helped perpetuate the misbelief that the brand -XIT- stands for “Ten In Texas”. The brand, in fact, was originated to thwart rustlers.

This map shows the borders of the original XIT ranch:

The history of the Texas State Capitol is closely tied to the origins of the XIT Ranch, and is an interesting story to read if you haven’t heard it previously. My wife read Timothy Egan’s book “The Worst Hard Time” several months ago about the dust bowl era in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandle regions, so that makes this trip even more meaningful for her. She grew up coming to Dalhart in the summertime to spend time with her grandmother. Lots of family ties on her side of the family to this area and its history. I’m looking forward to learning more about that in the next two days.

I posted some photos from today along with 16 videos from the rodeo tonight to Flickr. (These are all short, since Flickr limits video uploads to a maximum of 90 seconds.)

The ribs and brisket at Hodie’s BBQ in Dalhart tonight were some of the best I’ve EVER tasted:

We watched the opening night of the rodeo this evening and will be back again tomorrow night for more rodeo action as well as the famous XIT rodeo free barbeque! Of the six or seven bullriders we saw tonight at the end of the rodeo, only one was able to ride the requisite eight seconds and earn a score. Two of the bulls the riders rode were young bulls which have NEVER been ridden before successfully. Those records were NOT broken tonight.

This is one of the bull rides from tonight:

Without a doubt, the biggest surprise of the night was watching this cow milking competition which neither my wife or I had ever seen at a rodeo before:

What fun! It’s not every day we get to watch the world’s most dangerous sport, “live” and “in person” just a few yards away from where we are sitting. Thanks to my Sony GC1 digital camera / camcorder I’m sure we’ll be able to document tomorrow’s events well too. Events like this provide a great opportunity for storychasing!

Technorati Tags:
rodeo, dalhart, xit, texas, history, panhandle, cowboy, barbeque, bbq

I had a wonderful visit over the phone this evening with Derek Baird, who USED to be with Yahoo! for Teachers (before Yahoo cancelled the program - although strangely the website is still up) and I’ve known through our collaborative work for the professional development committee of the K-12 Online Conference. We were visiting about my new job working as the director of technology and education outreach for the Oklahoma Heritage Association, and Derek told me about MemoryArchive. The tagline for the site is:

Welcome to MemoryArchive, the encyclopedia of memories.
Everyone has a Story. Make Yours History.

The right sidebar has a brief description of “How MemoryArchive Works:”

1. You add your story. Learn how here.
2. The editors fix formatting and index the content, if necessary.
3. After your story is correctly formatted and indexed we will lock it, that is, no further edits will be made unless you request them.

A FAQ page is available, along with invitations to become a MemoryArchive Site Steward and a MemoryArchive Affiliate, which sounds like a great idea for the OHA. The teachers and students page includes the following assignment ideas:

Have students write a memoir of a recent event.
Have students write a memoir of a common event (that is, one they all experienced) and compare the results.
Have students interview their parents or grandparents about an event and post it on MemoryArchive.
Have students read and compare memoirs of the same event.
Have students recruit others to write memoirs.
Have students create a “time capsule” of memoirs.

To sample the power of the site to index stories, I did a search in the left sidebar for “Air Force,” and read “September 11th on Holloman Air Force Base, by Christopher Gstattenbauer.” His story reminded me of where I was and what I was doing on September 11, 2001. I had just started work at Texas Tech University the previous month in the College of Education, and we were still housed in the old administration building. I saw the twin towers come down on a television in our learning resources center on the 3rd floor, and I was in shock like I imagine most U.S. citizens were. I penned and published the article “Time to Weed the Garden” on September 14, 2001. I wouldn’t start blogging until the summer of 2003, so this was a static webpage I published on my site. Not many people saw it, most likely, but at the time I felt it was very important to write it. Obviously those who led our nation to a war which continues to the present moment in both Afghanistan and in Iraq saw things differently than I did at the time, and still do. Thankfully we are having an election in several months when we, as a body politic, will have an opportunity to remedy some of the mistakes of the past at the ballot box.

Turns out there are currently 200 different stories on MemoryArchive to date about 9-11. Amazing. And the site is growing.

Memory Archive uses MediaWiki as its wiki engine, but it is quite different in its approach toward articles than WikiPedia. I am definitely going to discuss and share MemoryArchive during the EncycloMedia conference presentation I’m sharing in several weeks in Oklahoma City with Vicki Allen titled, “Get Wiki With It! Using Wikis for Collaboration and Learning.” This type of project would be fantastic for StoryChasers as well as our Celebrate Oklahoma Voices project.

Technorati Tags:
wiki, memory, history, story, share, sharing, archive, write, writing, literacy

I learned recently about an educator who is making a professional development journey across the United States to work with teachers and schools on using collaborative web 2.0 tools with students, and I sent her an email with the following information. These are collaborative projects I want to make sure she knows about, as well as the special place where I work now, and am sharing this here so you’ll know about these projects and place too!

1. Celebrate Oklahoma Voices (COV)

http://celebrateoklahoma.us/

COV is a statewide digital storytelling project empowering learners to become digital witnesses, archiving local oral history and sharing that history safely on the global stage of the Internet. We have used grant funding from SBC and AT&T to provide “digital backpacks” of equipment for participating educators including a digital audio recorder, digital camera, headset with mic, and flash drive. We provide 2.5 day workshops in which educators learn how to use these technology tools to create digital stories, so they can return to their classrooms and help students create and share them. Our learning community is open, however, and we have approximately 80 digital stories there now which have been created by Oklahoma teachers and students. These can be used as great examples of local digital storytelling, and your workshop participants are welcome to contribute to our project as well. We will be migrating our website to a new learning community using Drupal later this fall, but all our stories will remain online and available. Our learning community is:
http://celebrateoklahoma.ning.com/

2. StoryChasers - empowering responsible digital citizenship
http://storychasers.org

Storychasers is a new project I am just helping to organize currently, but will be supporting in 2007-2008 and beyond. I anticipate writing grants which will support StoryChasers as well, and this is a broader initiative which can include eduators and students across the nation. The description of the project we have now is:

Storychasers is a multi-state (and potentially multi-national) educational collaborative empowering students and teachers to responsibly record and share stories of local, regional and global interest as citizen journalists. Where STN (Student Television Network) participants may focus more narrowly on student broadcast news productions, Storychasers has a broader focus on not only student-created news broadcasts, but also student-created documentary films and live event coverage (webcasting). Storychaser media productions can be shared as live broadcast events or recorded, asynchronously shared audio and video files.

We have a meeting in Elluminate tonight at 7 pm central which you are welcome to join. That Elluminate link will be posted on:
http://storychasers.org/?q=node/32

3. K-12 Online Conference

http://k12onlineconference.org/
The K-12 Online Conference is the best resource I know to share with teachers as we help them become more self-directed in their professional development and specifically focused on the use of interactive new-media technologies / web 2.0 tools for learning. The conference is all online, free, and takes place in October each year, although conference presentations are archived indefinitely. The official website description of K12online is:

The K-12 Online Conference invites participation from educators around the world interested in innovative ways Web 2.0 tools and technologies can be used to improve learning. This FREE conference is run by volunteers and open to everyone. The 2008 conference theme is “Amplifying Possibilities”. This year’s conference begins with a pre-conference keynote the week of October 13, 2008. The following two weeks, October 20-24 and October 27-31, forty presentations will be posted online to the conference blog (this website) for participants to download and view. Live Events in the form of three “Fireside Chats” and a culminating “When Night Falls” event will be announced. Everyone is encouraged to participate in both live events during the conference as well as asynchronous conversations.

4. Great Book Stories
http://greatbookstories.pbwiki.com/

Great Book Stories is a collaborative project with a simple premise using powerful technology: We encourage students to share short digital book reviews using VoiceThread about books they have enjoyed reading. The project website is a collaborative wiki, where teachers are welcome to add links to their students’ own VoiceThread examples. This project not only provides a great opportunity for teachers and students to learn how to use VoiceThread to create and share interactive digital stories safetly online, but it also provides a great opportunity for teachers to learn more about using a wiki in a collaborative project.

5. Oklahoma Heritage Association (OHA) and Gaylord-Pickens Museum
http://oklahomaheritage.com

I’d like to invite you to the Oklahoma Heritage Association and Gaylord-Pickens Museum, where we are focused on preserving the unique history of Oklahoma while promoting pride in our great state. We honor our state’s rich tradition by telling Oklahoma’ story through its people. We have a beautiful museum in the heart of Oklahoma City that features thirty digital stories of famous Oklahomans, organized around five characteristics of an Oklahoman – perseverance, pioneer spirit, optimism, generosity and individualism. I’d love to give you a tour of the museum as well as meet you in person if you come through OKC, so please let me know if this can work out. More information about our museum is available.

Thanks to a recent, generous grant from Dell, field trips for many students in the Oklahoma City area to our museum are now completely free (bus gasoline and all is paid for!) More information about field trips as well as a scholarship application for metro-area schools is also available.

This podcast features a recording with Steven Smith, a wonderful re-enactor of Benjamin Franklin, at the 2008 Oklahoma A+ Schools Conference on August 1st. In the character of Benjamin Franklin, Steven recounts historial events of his life as an inventor, statesman, author and civic activist. If there is a more memorable and impactful way to learn about historical characters than having an animated conversation like this one with Benjamin Franklin, I’m not sure what they are! This was a lot of fun! Thanks to Steven for granting this interview and permission to share it online. Steven role plays several characters in addition to Ben Franklin including Peter Cartwright, Professor B Looney and Tupper the Clown. Visit the podcast shownotes for links to his websites. He is based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but shares his wit, wisdom and life lessons with audiences young and old around the United States.

 

 Podcast270: A Conversation with Benjamin Franklin- Inventor, Statesman, Author and Civic Activist [21:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (797)

Show Notes:

1. Blooney.com - Website of Steven Smith
2. Oklahoma Arts Council website for storyteller Stephen Robert Smith: AKA Ben Franklin
3. Christian Sanity Theater website for Stephen Robert Smith
4. WikiPedia article for Benjamin Franklin
5. Oklahoma A+ Schools

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Technorati Tags: history, benfranklin, benjaminfranklin, franklin, story, storytelling, actor, reenactor, constitution

This podcast is a recorded skype conversation between Cheryl Lykowski and Wesley Fryer, discussing a new idea for a collaborative project titled “StoryChasers.” The current (but evolving) “about” page for the StoryChasers website states: Storychasers is a multi-state (and potentially multi-national) educational collaborative empowering students and teachers to responsibly record and share stories of local, regional and global interest as citizen journalists. Where the STN (Student Television Network) focuses on student broadcast news productions, Storychasers has a specific focus on student-created documentary films as well as live event coverage (webcasting). If you are interested in these ideas, please join our open Skypecast on  Wednesday, July 30, 2008 for a skypecast discussion about this proposed initiative. We will start at 8 pm Eastern / 7 pm Central / 6 pm Mountain / 5 pm Pacific.

 

 Podcast269: Background and Formative Ideas for the Storychasers Project [27:05m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1003)

Show Notes:

1. Join our Skypecast Wed, July 20, 2008 at 7 pm US Central time
2. StoryChasers website and learning community (in development)
3. Blog of Cheryl Lykowski
4. Student Television Network (STN)
5. Website of Kevin Honeycutt

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Technorati Tags: story, storychaser, digitalstorytelling, storytelling, skype, skypecast, history, oralhistory, broadcasting, narrowcasting, video

I’ve written a draft of an article for the Oklahoma Heritage Association’s membership magazine entitled, “Empowering Oklahoma Educators to Preserve and Share Oral History.” This is shared as a published Google document. It will likely be revised at least a bit later this week, but as it stands it provides a great deal more background about the Celebrate Oklahoma Voices project, our U.S.S. Oklahoma Memorial Dedication Digital Learning Project last December, and my new work for the OHA than I’ve shared in one place online to date.

If you see any needed corrections or have suggestions to change this article please let me know.

Technorati Tags:
cov, oklahoma, history, story, storytelling, digital, digitalstorytelling, oralhistory, pearlharbor, worldwarii