Digital Stories
I was asked to talk about Charles Dickens to support a December 2020 Alabama Shakespeare Festival production of A Christmas Carol. It's one of my favorite books by Dickens. And working with Susan Willis, dramaturg at ASF, a good friend and former colleague, to talk about something I absolutely love--what a joy that was. My argument is that great literature is a tool for living and surviving, it's not just escapism (though getting lost in a fascinating story is awesome). The timeless stories help us always. Check it out on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=220672449446426
Right: at an AUM Commencement. I'm telling the story of "Open."
Life is a series of stories. Sometimes we speak them. Sometimes we write them. Sometimes we turn them into digital stories. Sometimes I am in them (and omg, I just heard my Southern accent in the convocation talk). Sometimes they have horrible black bars running along the sides of the video. Sometimes I create social media spaces for myself or my dog or my place of employment. In matters of communication, aural, oral, or digital, I figure out what I want to do, I google the process, I take a workshop, I ask friends, I manage to say what I want to say. And then I share my say. It's not beautiful like LOTR: Return of the King, but it's done. It's a process. It's a mystery. It's just work.
And it's my work: visual/aural/oral rhetoric is my business and my profession. What a great decision I made to spend 23 years in college studying communication and how we use words and images to make connections. And I'm glad that the iPhone was something Apple decided to pursue in my adulthood.
I was delighted to grow up with only the mere possibility of a personal computer--I had a blissful youth ignorant of most computing tech. The AppleIIe, however, enabled me to graduate from college so I no longer had to type papers and estimate the space I needed at the end of each page for footnotes. That was hell. And grad school would have been a bridge too far without a laptop. I could at least type (thanks to the death march to typewriting class my mother forced me to take for one entire summer). My teaching life became rich and lively when I blogged along with my students and when I engaged with them via social media. It wasn't so much about me as it was about us. Then I found it was fun for me.
Links to my personal social media appear at the bottom of this page. But I'll stick one link below to a blog I loved writing and a couple of fun tiny films I've made (they are on that blog here). This was a blog where I worked out my thinking about a bit of everything, about visual rhetoric, and how I felt about open resources and copyleft: E.D. Woodworth Writes.
Creating with words and images online, in a digital format, is satisfying and easy to share. By making blog stories, I can chronicle my professional thinking--always writing my way to new. An illusive tricky thought only stays out of my reach if I refuse to write it through or draw it out. I create to embrace change, innovation, and difference, no matter how that works out in writing, in speaking, in any digital, visual or textual form.
In the summer, Air University offers a school for International Officers before they begin the full academic year. It's meant to be a preparation for American university reading/writing/research. I was a seminar co-director in 2018, but I couldn't be there to greet the students on the first day. As the Director of Research and Electives AND for the Center for Writing Excellence, I didn't want to miss a chance to say hello and welcome,we're excited you're here. So I did this.
This is easily the most fun I've ever had creating a digital story. I chose to write about my dog, Stella, (she's on Instagram: stellathedivadachshund). At the Story Center in Berkeley, CA, during a digital story workshop, I played with this. I find joy in this, and exhaustion. My dog is a lot of fun, but I'd just come from several years of being a single mom and the primary caregiver for my father with Alzheimer's. He'd recently died, and I was angry, but I also wanted to laugh. This is resolution in story form.
This quick video was made on my iPhone with music from a young Airman assigned to the Air War College--now at AU HQ. It's about a seminar offered at the AWC called Grand Strategy Concentration. Each year a small group of students (not more than 15) study intently about Grand Strategy (that's a military/civilian leadership thing that the highest, most senior leaders in our government care about). This was made to introduce new students to this opportunity.
This is one shot from a short slide show/video I created (with talented editor Dr. Justin Hodgson) that shared my vision of the Journal of Undergraduate Multimodal Projects, the JUMP. This was a small part, No. 12, of several sections in the "article" titled "Making the Jump: Digital Publishing and Collaboration" in EDUCAUSE Review: Why IT Matters in Higher Education. For many years, I was part of the editorial collaborative contributing responses or thinking as called upon. It was a grand intellectual experience.