The North Wind Blew South from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

What I love even more about this is the story of Keith and his new fame. He is creating new art in a way that hasn’t been done before and it is spreading to wide audiences around the world. This is a story of an amateur who has perfected his craft to become a professional who is being requested for art shows and exhibitions around the world.

I tweeted the link to Keith’s Vimeo Channel and soon my acquaintance, Neil, replied with links to two of his favorite tiltshift artists Olivo Barbieri and Toni Hafkenschied.  This inspired me to learn more.

Tiltshifting was new to me. I needed to learn more. I found info on composing tiltshifting on wikipedia and realized it needed special equipment or edditing software. Upon further searching I found tiltshift maker, a program that automatically tiltshifts pictures. Below is a slide show of some pictures from my European vacation this past summer that I experimented tiltshifting with.  Do you have a favorite?

I like this style because it adds a different perspective. I get the feeling that some of these images could be minature models or toys. As in life situations, value can be gained by looking at things in a different way.

Neil, tiltshifted some of his photo’s and commented that he wanted to try this project with his students. Without this web based program, timeshifting would be difficult for his students to do. Hopefully he and the class give it a shot.

Typical, right?

Who can blame the man, he probably gets spammed with these type of requests all the time. But, I followed this request by @ashvala, who turned out to be a 13 year old, grade 9 student from Bangalore. His site looks sharp and is well designed.

After reading Ashvala’s Bio, I decided to use twitter persuasion to convince Guy Kawasaki to give it a glance. Within a minute he did and tweeted back feedback to the young “techie who loves gadgets and enjoys reviewing them.”

In the end Ashvala received a little feedback & a pat on the back from one of the biggest names on the web. Happy ending to a short story.

This is another demonstration of the power of twitter to connect people. On twitter people become a little more equal. Kudos to Guy for stepping up.

As this was all happening, Sandi contacted me for a Skype call. Not knowing what to talk with the students about I decided on an impromptu virtual tour of the University of Regina campus. (Being a university student is one area in which I excel.) Thanks to the wireless network on campus, I carried my Macbook through the halls showing this group of students a few classrooms. We only lost the signal as I descended from the 6th floor in the elevator. From there, I lead them down hallways and explored the new gymnasium.

Connecting with these students for 10 minutes was the highlight of my day. They were interested in the University and I hope this experience will provoke future questions and investigation of higher education.

This is just a another brief success story of using Skype to connect to people outside the walls of the classroom.

For now I think I should be hired on at the University as a recruiter. Anybody else want a tour?

| View | Upload your own

*note: uploading to slideshare changed the layout and design of the slides

Creation of Bear’s Birthday

The origin of this project lies in my interest in digital storytelling and my lack of having created many examples of quality or substance. A spark hit the paper when Karen, the instructor of my ‘Teaching of Writing’ course, introduced a story writing project for class. I had recently visited Dean Miezienko’s class with Dean Shareski, where Dean S. introduced the class to digital storytelling, naturally I came home with a few ideas for format. Unfortunately, I struggled with character development and the the topic of my piece. At this point, the project was moved to the back burner for a couple weeks.

My eyes are always open for teaching resources and at a Apple MacBook Training session, the rep John Maschuk*, shared a file of teddy bear pictures. He welcomed us to use the resource and the spark from my writing course took. I am a visual individual when it comes to these type of creations and I had worked with storyboards before. I was instantly inspired. I worked the slides into an outline of a story and then pulled the pieces together. As I built the sequence I naturally played with the story, character development and word choice. The visuals of this project were created in Powerpoint and I saved many files containing changes to the original drafts.

At the beginning stages of my revision process I shared early drafts with Sean White, a new friend from class. Between Shawn and my wife, Joleen, the story was enhanced by their trusted insight and suggestion. From their feedback I made some key edits to create a more patterned sequence, modified the sentence structure and played with general appeal of the slide design. At this point, I saved the slides as .jpg files, and I imported them into iMovie for narration, transition and sound. As I narrated the story I found more glitches in how the story was written. It is really interesting to reread something out loud and record it to get a different perspective of the voice of the writing. From this experience I had another revision stage and needed to make necessary changes to the slides in Powerpoint and then go through the importing process again.

I had a fun time recording and re-recording the narration as I tried to be vibrant and fluffy as required for such a piece. A point of suggestion is to make short sound bites, I read 2 or 3 slides at a time and then pieced the audio together. In this practice I avoided having to re-read the entire story when I accidentally mis-spoke.

While I was designing the slides I was thinking of adding Batmanesque onomatopoeia through visual sound bubbles and bursts of text. I decided against this because I wanted to keep the visual simple and uncluttered. Ultimately this idea still worked through the recording process as I ‘wrote in’ sound effects and music to enhance the story.

Version 1.0 of “Bear’s Birthday” is born on to the web

At this point I felt the story was ready to publish, but I decided to sleep on it. The next morning I reviewed the story and found another spelling error and changed the text color in a couple places. The story was then ready for publishing. I exported “Bear’s Birthday” as a .mov file and uploaded it to Youtube and disperse to an audience. I shared the story through numerous email, facebook, WebCT and Twitter. I may of been guilty of spam, or maybe it was my marketing background shining through. I told my audience that this was version 1.0 and asked them to participate in a networked revision. The audience grew and I recieved numerous comments through a variety of streams including email, Private messages, Youtube and blog comments. Karen Janowski, even took a few minutes out of her day to call me up on skype to share her interest, encourage me and other suggestions from a special education perspective. All of this feedback demonstrates the power of social media in creating quality web content and I really appreciate the attention folks gave to this piece. From the feedback, I made major edits, including a spelling error, a couple changes to the story and some slide redesign. Can you catch the edits?

After this batch of story edits to the visuals, I had an opportunity to visit Mrs. Lichtenwald’s Grade 1 class to share this story and get their opinions. They were into it and wanted to watch it a couple times. After the second viewing I asked them what could be changed or improved. I received some fantastic critique and feedback, one child even suggested that I add a character named “Mr.Noodle”. I chuckled, thanked him and told him I would think about it A few others liked the sound effects and suggested that should have more. I agreed and invited a few them for their best sound effect to add to the story. We all laughed and had fun.

After publishing the first version of Bear’s Birthday, this story saw a more indepth analysis and polishing. My participatory audience included related professionals from a variety of backgrounds including graphic design, teaching, music recording, ESL teachers, experienced digital storytellers and best of all, the children. This collaborative exercise has many potential applications in my future classroom. The relationship with audience gave me a sense of ownership and mastery with the writing and creative process. I wanted to created the best possible piece and my network of friends, family and acquaintances help make this a reality.

With out further ado, I present “Bear’s Birthday Version 2.0″

I am still welcoming feedback on this story and welcome suggestions for improvement. Enjoy.

Note: I would like confirm John Maschuk’s identity, thank him and link to any web presence he may have. So if you are out there John, leave me a note.