Cathy Healy

Cathy Healy works with K-12 classrooms worldwide as they make a difference in the world.

Cathy Healy

Advocate for K-12 Global Collaborations

First TEDx talk: Opening Eyes and Hearts

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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.]

The DR and Haiti are on the same island. Who knows, maybe I go over and learn from what they are doing in Haiti with digital storytelling. Their DNA is programed for brilliant products — I learned today that storytelling has a long and deep tradition in Haiti, and storytellers still ply their trade.
Now how can our students at Cèsar Chavez Prep*, a public charter middle school in DC, enlarge their experiences to walk in the shoes of Haitians and Dominican Republicans? What can we set up to open eyes and minds if I am there?

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

Digital Storytelling: Why Teenagers Love Doing It

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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.”

Adam Gopnik: Writing for ear v. writing for the eye

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Adam Gopnik’s review of the Autobiography of Mark Twain: Volume 1 drills quickly to a truth about spoken language and written language, and the skill involved in creating the sense of speaking for readers. 

“[The] book… emerges now as a disjointed and largely baffling bore.
“This is a fault not of the editors but of Twain’s conception and, it must be said, of his dictated prose, which is slack and anti-rhythmic. Scarcely a single sentence in the whole thousand pages stands out to be admired. People who write by ear, as Twain did, are often really writing by eye; the variations in sentence length and syllable count, which give the effect of speech, depend on seeing the sentences set down. Left to our own devices, we all speak sentences of about the same length and style.

These differences are much on my mind since I’ve begun creating digital stories, but in the opposite way. Traditional digital storytelling begins by writing a 200-word (+/-) narration, then you reading the story into a mic, putting your narration into a video-editing program and adding images and background music.

What happens, though, is that as soon as you start to read your story out loud, you begin to change the words so that they aren’t reading words, but spoken words, with a spoken rhythm.

Adam Gopnik’s writing style in his own autobiographies — my favorite being Paris to the Moon — reads like a relaxed conversation. So I wondered as I read The New Yorker this morning, how Gopnik’s books sound when they are read out loud.

When you’re retired, you have time to indulge your wonderings, so I dodged into Amazon and found a five-minute clip from the unabridged Audiobook ($30). I listen. Amazon doesn’t say who is reading Paris to the Moon; it is easy to imagine that it is Gopnik…or David Sedaris, whose voice and cadence sound about the same. This is not quite a compliment, because I’ve found that listening to Sedaris’s humor gets boring pretty quickly, even though Sedaris, like Gopnik, is a great read.

Now I’m really wondering. How does Nora Ephron sound? Great! Funny without straining. A performance. I’m listening now to a 10-minute segment from the unabridged Audiobook ($10) of I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts On Being a Woman. Is it Ephron herself? I don’t know and I don’t care. The woman sounds like I think Ephron would sound — and, even though I can keep up this wondering indulgence all morning, I need to stop and get some writing of my own done.