Facebook Report last night from Carlos Miranda Levy:

TEDxWomen@PortauPrince was a success. A modest but very engaged audience enjoyed the live presentations by Emeline Desert and Cathy Healy. Students from the Ecole Supérieure d’Infotronique d’Haïti (ESIH) became interested in the MUCI Solidarity Kitchens model presented by Emeline and the audience shared with Cathy how storytelling is an important element in Haitian culture. More details soon… 🙂

Carlos’ summary proves the point of my TEDx talk:  Skype is like life — real communication comes through sharing stories. I didn’t know that storytellers were and still are part of the Haitian culture until my talk, which fortunately was more of a Q&A. Now that I know about Haitian skill in storytelling, I will always remember it, because I will connect that information with the sight of strangers willing to stay late to listen to me talk about storytelling and who started talking about taking action and beginning to teach digital storytelling.

I can’t wait to see what happens next. Now that will be a story!

In their quest, the Haitians might be able to use practical information about how to teach digital storytelling, so I’m about to post this to Carlos’ Facebook wall:

1) Digital Storytelling started in the San Francisco area with what is now the Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS). Joe Lambert, the founder and still the head of CDS is the master of the discipline. He and his team and have practical advice that is helpful, especially for community groups. The head of our Reuters Digital Vision Fellowship Program at Stanford, Stuart Gannes, is on the Center’s board. (Carlos and I met as Fellows and I did my training through CDS.)

2) Jason Ohler used digital storytelling brilliantly in his classroom in Alaska. He’s gone on to become a workshop guru and wrote a superb, practical, $$$$ book that I use. I also use his website, which has a tremendous amount of good, free advice.

3) In Haiti, you must be especially careful because Digital Storytelling can deepen trauma. Brain research shows that a trauma makes a new, deep channel in your brain. Re-imagining the details will deepen and widen that channel, and digital storytelling is emotionally powerful. You have to think hard about how to tell a story in 200 words (about a three-minute video), what to put in, what to leave out. You have to imagine intensely about what images will show the trauma and you have to remember what sound effects and music to use to convey your feelings.

The South Africans have a way to help you use the storytelling power to turn trauma into a new positive brain channel. Psychiatrists there developed a serious of lessons for their children, many of whom were AIDs orphans and/or had been abused, robbed, beaten, raped in the violence. Using the lessons, called “My Hero,” children create a book that leads them through their trauma and focuses on how they are heroes because they survived and are thriving. These books could also be scanned and made into videos. Steve Vosloo in Capetown, a fellow Fellow, was working with the My Hero psychiatrists for his Stanford project. Steve is generous and kind. He’ll be glad to connect you to the experts you might want to talk to. [email protected].

I just finished giving a TEDx talk about digital storytelling for the TEDxWomen in Port au Prince, Haiti.  may have been up against Jane Fonda talking about the new old age at 5 pm (ET) in the Big Deal TEDxWomen today. Who knows, and I don’t care.  I had less than 24 hours to prepare a Skype talk to inspire Haitians to begin to use digital storytelling in their efforts to make life better there, and way before I finished, they were talking about how to do it.

That’s what TEDx is all about. Marlene Sam, a Haitian techie, best Skype moderator I’ve ever worked with, positioned the camera so that I could see the side of her face — close enough so that I could get feedback from her, and see the audience farther back.

My message was simple. In the old days, we actually had to walk with each other to see the world through the other’s eyes: mind-to-mind, heart-to-heart. This isolated us in our own villas and cities and tribes and nations.

In our interconnected world, we need to be able to feel and see and think about the world with open eyes. If you can travel somewhere and talk in someone’s shoes, you can still open your mind and heart in the traditional way.

The reality though is that most people can’t afford to travel, especially children and teen-agers. Now we can have conversations on Skype to talk together across boundaries, but quick impressions based on the rooms and facial expressions take a long time to develop into real relationships because meeting someone on Skype don’t show someone’s heart.

Like the Skype “conversation” I had today in Port au Prince. All they could get was a “blink,” a quick, maybe faulty reaction. You probably won’t see my heart.

I asked the audience to imagine what can happen when you combine an nice-to-meet-you Skype conversation with a digital story– an honest story that you tell about myself, that you illustrate with photos and drawings and a soundtrack. My plan was to show how their understanding would expand or change about me if they saw a digital story that I made. I said that our conversation would shift even more if I saw a digital story they had done about themselves. Then we could begin a real conversation.

At least that was my plan, and then I’d show them Ali and Me. 

However, Marlene and the TEDx Port au Prince group were ahead of me. They’d alway watched the video earlier.

No problem. They already knew me; they knew digital storytelling and the TEDx lecture became even more of a conversation.

What will happen next I don’t know about Haiti, but Carlos Miranda Levy, my fellow Stanford Fellow (Reuters Digital Vision Fellowship) friend is talking about me coming down to the Dominican Republic in January to give a workshop. [Update 12/2/11: Now Carlos is talking about workshops in the DR and Haiti.  I want to figure out how to make this student to student, teacher to teacher, too by including our students and teachers at Cèsar Chavez Prep Middle School.]

_____
[Note: I volunteer two days at week at Prep.]

My friend in Santiago, Chile, Jo Rivas Albornoz, wrote to me after my Digital Storytelling lectures and workshop for English-language teachers at the Instituto Chileno Norteamericano: “I have worked using technology in the classroom; I have seen how technology is used by different teachers in several places. But this is something really powerful.”

“Why?!” I replied at once.

Jo explained:

I think Digital Storytelling is very powerful because it combines different things that engage students, especially teenagers.

Teens love to talk about themselves, they also love technology, so mixing both things is a very useful tool for teachers for keeping them motivated.

But what really makes me feel that it is very powerful is what you told me about the idea of your town’s museum. [CH: Pictures are ‘dead’ to the coming generations with stories attached.] I love to see my grandmother’s old photographs. When she was alive we always looked at her pictures and she told me some stories about them. She died some years ago. It would be very different now if I could show my children a video telling her stories herself. They almost don’t remember her.

You know that I hate pictures (I’m not photogenic at all), I feel that pictures take our soul away. But a video shows us as we are, listening to our voices, watching our gestures, is different. If you combine that in a story and add some other things like images, you could have a digital version of a person, her personality reflected in the way the story is told, the way the images are used, the intonation in the voice. IT IS POWERFUL, isn’t it?

These are Jo’s first digital story results. http://www.youtube.com/user/norteamericanocde. Jo’s students are teenagers who attended the Institute on a government scholarship program that pays for 200 hours of study. “They dedicated about one hour a week to the Digital Storytelling Project,” she said. “The idea was to write about their professional career.”