Telling your story

Blogs are not simply about text. They can also encompass hyperlinks, sounds, videos, and images. Blogging is also about telling your story. Today I was involved in teaching a session for a BA group on the use of digital photography and communication. Specifically, the session focused on images as narrative, and all of the group managed to create some impressive and in some cases stunning image sequences. I used images from a trip with my students to the Gambia in 2009 to present my own example of a narrative at the beginning of the session. I thought I would share it with you here on my blog. I hope you find it interesting.

This image is of a man looking out over the sea, in a coastal village in the Gambia. Poverty is commonplace here, given that the Gambia is one of the poorest countries in Africa. One of the few jobs most young Gambian boys can do is fishing. It's a dangerous, low paid job, and this image depicts some of the boats they use to launch themselves out to sea.

This image is of children collecting firewood for the compound cooking fires. There is no electricity or gas in most parts of the Gambia, so open fires are the most common means of cooking. Children also fetch water, sometimes from several kilometers away from their villages, and because of the necessity for this work, they often miss school. As a visiting group, my colleagues and I, along with our students, saw the need and raised money for a new well to be sunk in the village. The children don't have to walk 4 kilometers each time they needed to fetch a pail of water anymore. Now they can go to school.

I took this image of a young girl sat in a village compound. I couldn't resist capturing the photo, because it was so iconic and representative of the children in this part of the world, and it conveyed innocence and hope. I showed her the image on my digital camera, and she was shocked but delighted. She clearly recognised herself, but I don't think she had seen a camera before, and probably not an image of herself anywhere else other than in her reflection.

I decided to use a reworked version of the picture of the young girl in a blog post called 'What Price Education?' to hammer home the message that every child deserves a good education. In the Gambia, children can only go to school until they are 11 years old, because the state only funds primary education, and it's very basic. There are few secondary schools, and children can only attend them if their parents can afford the fees. Very few can. As a result, Gambian children are some of the most disadvantaged children in the world. I couldn't think of a better was to use the image than in a manipulated front cover of the National Geographic magazine. It was very easy to do. Using PowerPoint, I created a yellow background, and a smaller blue background for the frame, and then placed the image above. Finally, I chose appropriate coloured font styles to mimic the familiar National Geographic livery. I saved the image as a .jpeg file and then uploaded it to the blog like any other image. I hope you like the images and that in some way, they speak to you.

 Photos by Steve Wheeler


Telling your story by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Flickring about

I've been playing around with Flickr during my holiday, and I'm quite impressed at how quickly you can upload images, tag them, geomap them (locate photos on a map to show where they were taken) and publicise them to all and sundry. In just three days of being a Flickr member, I have posted 27 photos, received 50 views and about half a dozen comments, all very positive, about my artistic expertise and skills in photogenic composition (here's one I made earlier - know where it is anyone??). If you want to see some more, you go to my photo collection and have a look. This is all very encouraging and affirmative stuff, and must be a key reason why Flickr is so addictive. Flickrites are just so darn nice!

Anyway, it got me thinking about all the teaching and learning posibilities of Flickr and other photo-sharing/social networking services. A big selling point is the fact that the discussion centres upon an object - in this case an image - which could be any kind of learning object. Another useful feature is that there is the facility to 'favourite' an image - this counts as a kind of polling or voting function - another useful learning tool.

Now I've got the hang of it, I'm busying my little mind on how I can possibly harness the potential of Flickr (and Picasa, and others) to enhance my teaching sessions, and enable students to become more creative in their learning endeavours.