Have a story you’re burning to tell? Want to create a unique tribute to someone who has influenced your life? Struggling to communicate the value your organisation brings to the world? Digital storytelling is a powerful way for individuals, NGOs and businesses to tell the stories that matter to them.

This three-day course will give you all the skills you need to create your own short film, from beginning to end. No previous experience is needed – so long as you have basic computer skills, we will teach you all the rest.

Dates: Thursday 13 – Saturday 15 August, 9-5pm
Venue: Constellation House, Rondebosch
Fee: R 2,400 including snacks, lunch, equipment rental and final DVD production.

Want to know more?

• See Minah’s story below for a sample of what you could produce.
• Download the info sheet.
• Contact me if you want to sign up.

“My name is Minah” — personal narrative made during a digital storytelling workshop I facilitated, August 2011.

… digital storytelling workshops never get old. Like all healthy practices, storytelling renews and changes everyone involved in the process. — Joe Lambert

Everybody has a story: Every person, every business, every NGO. And storytelling is an incredibly powerful way to get a message across, whether that message is “Gran, you rock,” “Our employees really care about you” or “Your donation could change a child’s life”.

Now that we tell stories on YouTube rather than by the fireside, you need some new skills to do it — and the good news is they’re not hard to learn. In this workshop, we’ll take you from novice to filmmaker in three short, exhilarating, boundary-busting days. You’ll leave not just with a movie and something to add to your CV, but new friends, new insight and a whole lot of new confidence.

When: 9am Thursday August 9th to 4pm Saturday August 13th.
Where: Constellation House, 6 Oakvale Road, Rondebosch.
How Much: R2,400 — including catering, computer hire, post production and delivery of final DVD.

Want to know more?

• Watch some sample stories.
• Download the info sheet.
• Contact me if you want to sign up.

I’ve been having great fun writing explainer video scripts for the incredibly talented team at Blink Tower. Here’s the first finished one:

Clueless aid worker goes to “Africa”:

From Howards End by EM Forster:

"Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the gray, sober against the fire."

…"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die."

via ‘Only Connect’ : Selected Forster Quotes.

The US military is now taking an interest in storytelling as well:

“Stories exert a powerful influence on human thoughts and behavior. They consolidate memory, shape emotions, cue heuristics and biases in judgment, influence in-group/out-group distinctions, and may affect the fundamental contents of personal identity. It comes as no surprise that these influences make stories highly relevant to vexing security challenges such as radicalization, violent social mobilization, insurgency and terrorism, and conflict prevention and resolution. Therefore, understanding the role stories play in a security context is a matter of great import and some urgency,” DARPA stated. “Ascertaining exactly what function stories enact, and by what mechanisms they do so, is a necessity if we are to effectively analyze the security phenomena shaped by stories. Doing this in a scientifically respectable manner requires a working theory of narratives, an understanding of what role narratives play in security contexts, and examination of how to best analyze stories-decomposing them and their psychological impact systematically.”

Thanks Norman Hooper for the link.

I’m running Cape Town’s first digital storytelling workshop for the year over three days from Friday February 4 to Sunday February 6 Constellation House in Rondebosch.

Digital storytelling transforms memories, photographs, ideas and documents into short movies that capture the essence of a personal story. It’s not about reportage or documentary – it’s about each person finding their own voice as a storyteller, telling the stories that are most meaningful to them.

Joe Lambert, who taught at the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley, California, says this in his book:

The more we share the stress and strain of a corporate monoculture based on greed and accumulation, the more we want a gentle authenticity of experience. The more we search for authenticity, the more we turn our attention away from the siren call of bland uniformity, and we search for something individuated. And the way to hear those stories is not to change channels, or surf the machine made media, but to listen to our own stories, our own hearts, and the stories of our rich, local communities.

…By bringing people together to share stories and make artifact out of transformative narratives, we are able to stop and take stock, and find ways to insert these snapshots of existence into our daily dialogues. This is why digital storytelling workshops never get old. Like all healthy practices, storytelling renews and changes everyone involved in the process.

The first workshop is limited to six participants, but there will be more during the year. If you’d like to know more, check out the Facebook page, leave a comment here or contact me.

In the run-up to this year’s Geek Retreat, Elodie Kleynhans of Blinktower and I hatched a plan – to make a three-minute movie that would explore the essence of geekdom and (we hoped) inspire young people to be geeky (by which we mean being curious, passionate, hands-on and building things). Between Elodie’s corporate video background and my desire to teach digital storytelling, we came up with an ambitious vision of teams of people rushing around the Stanford Valley scripting, filming and editing their own movies in three days.

The final product was of course very different, a negotiated outcome between us and awesome team members Jon Maliepaard, Larry Claasen and Luisa Mazinter; the process was frenetic, fluid and at times verging on chaotic, but nobody lost their tempers and we all had the wonderful experience of creating both a strong team and a great product out of nothing in three days. We started as strangers and finished as friends – thank you all!

Here’s the movie – far from perfect, but it does capture some of the essence of what the weekend was about:

And here are three of the other projects that came out of the weekend:

• Solve my F***ing Problem – a source of problems for entrepreneurs to solve.
• Bootstrap Secrets – a collection of start-up wisdom gained the hard way.
• Who offers SA’s fastest DSL service?

And here are some roundups of the whole weekend:

• Mariska du Preez: What a great way to start the year
• Heather Ford: What really happened – or did it?

I loved it, and learned from it. Thanks Heather and Jarred for organising it, and Elan Lohmann and Avusa for making it possible.

Arthur Goldstuck of World Wide Worx shared some very important data about the South African mobile internet at yesterday’s NetProphet conference. Sponsor White Wall Web did a brief summary, and here is some additional information from my own notes*:

First up, a useful set of distinctions between different tiers of “the mobile internet” in South Africa:

• Tier 1: The WAP internet (used to download ringtones, wallpapers, etc). There are about 15m WAP-capable phones in SA right now, and about 14m actual users.
• Tier 2: The Mobile application internet (covering Mxit, Facebook, Twitter etc). There are about 15m MXIT accounts, but a very high proportion of people have downloaded the application then never used it. There are probably 10.56 m actual users (Arthur’s latest figures).
• Tier 3: Mobile web browsing – consciously using the internet. This accounts for around 4m people at most.

So if you’re after “the mobile internet market” in South Africa, who do you target? Understanding the difference between these three tiers of use is important, but you also need to know who’s actually spending money, on what.

The Mobility 2009/10 survey sampled urban mobile users and revealed two categories of interest:

1. The “Elephants” (about 10% of the total): These are high spenders, but their mobile use is unsophisticated – they tend to have high-performance phone with lots of features they don’t use (Arthur put this down to lack of knowledge – I’m not sure; preferences and the availability of other means of access probably also have a lot to do with it). Only 12% of Elephants use their phones to access the internet – if they do use the internet, they prefer to do so at home. Their use of mobile applications is lower than the average for all users. In short — this is not a viable target market for mobile applications. (I suspect this is the market segment I fall into: my iPhone is nice, but frankly I find it easier to use Twitter, etc on my Macbook).
2. The “Sophisticats” (about 9% of the total): Also high spenders, AND also very sophisticated in their use of their phones. They are more likely to access the internet on their phones than at home, and 52% of them vs just 19% of the Elephants can download applications on their phones.

The Sophisticats are your market, then. Don’t even think of trying to sell mobile apps to the whole country — South Africa may have 38 million mobile users (that’s actual users, not SIM cards), but it’s not a targetable market.

Things get even more interesting when you start comparing this market segmentation with the results of another survey World Wide Worx ran on schoolchildren in Gauteng, comparing the digital sophistication of 1400 private school vs 300 township school learners. The learners were asked to rate their own level of skill in various areas of PC and mobile phone use, with revealing and often surprising results:

• 85% of private school kids vs 20% of township kids rate themselves “advanced” at general use of PCs; the comparable figures for using Windows are 85% vs 42%.
• The kids rated their parents as less advanced than themselves, with the gap largest for township learners, suggesting that the support structure of parents and teachers is important.
• Parents and teachers think learners are a lot less advanced than the learners themselves think they are (just 53% of private school teachers rated their students advanced). That’s not just an artefact of boasting by the kids, either – they didn’t uniformly rate themselves good at everything, but presented a nuanced and believable picture of skill that varied across applications. (I’d still like to be sure that adults and learners were using the same definition of “advanced”, though – might learners not be honest but mistaken in estimating their own skill?).
• When it comes to general internet use, 85% of private school vs 30% of township school learners rate themselves advanced.
• The more specific the question, the narrower the gap gets: 44% of township learners rate themselves advanced Google users; for LiveSearch the figure is 22%, for Wolfram Alpha it’s 10% and for Ask Jeeves it’s 8%.
• 84% of private school vs 36% of township learners rate themselves advanced Facebook users.
• And how’s this: 45% of township kids rate themselves advanced at downloading multimedia content, and 32% at editing it.
• The gap narrows even further when it comes to cellphones: 46% of township learners rate themselves advanced at browsing the net on their phones, 38% at using email, 69% at using SMS and 67% at MXIT.
• Of private school learners, 76% rated rated themselves advanced at browsing the net on their phones, 90% at SMS and 64% at MXIT.
• MXIT’s lower cost clearly gives it an edge among township learners!

None of this, says Goldstuck, suggests that any of these kids are “born digital-ready”. The big secret, rather, is peer group learning: once their peers latch onto a new app, kids adopt it very fast. The big spike in Facebook use once they get to university reflects this. And there’s a problem: younger kids who are learning the Internet via Facebook think it IS the internet – outside its walled garden, they’re clueless.

It’s not about your age, though; it’s about what your digital peer group is doing and talking about. The message for those hoping to build a business for this market? Build digital peer group learning into both your development model and your business model.
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*All errors, omissions and misrepresentations purely mine. If you find any, please feel free to correct me.