Our Stories
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Our Stories (http://www.ourstories.org) is a joint project involving UNICEF, Google, OLPC and others to facilitate children telling their own stories and those of their communities around the world. The basic format will be 3-5 minute audio recordings with geodata, and optional text and images; these will be visualized on maps of the world, and shared publicly over local and global networks.
You can find more details at the main wikipage for the project (not just the OLPC storytelling component of it), at Stories mepemepe.com.
Background
The Story Corps team helped with advice about their own process for interviewing a friend or loved one that will work for a young audience of interviewers; the idea is to localize the process and surrounding projects, and to carry out class activities around such interviews in OLPC partner countries. The project hopes to have a third of all XO owners record a story by the end of next year.
A draft proposal outlines six initial countries [Brasil, Argentina, Uruguay, Nigeria, Rwanda, Ethiopia] and interface sketches.
- Update -- Uruguay, Rwanda, and Ethiopia are all still active OLPC countries; Nigeria had a 12-month hiatus thanks in part to a patent lawsuit covering the OLPC Nigerian keyboard; but 6,000 children and teachers are receiving XOs in mid-2009.
- Barbara Berry is starting a series of storytelling and learning workshops in-country, aiming to start sustainable seeds of storytelling. Ghana will host the first storytelling workshop in January, 2009.
The website designed for this phase of the project launched at http://www.ourstories.org in December 2007, and quickly blossomed to 8 languages, including Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba.
There is an Our Stories teachers guide developed with a great deal of input from Google's editorial team, and like the rest of the site work was made to make this ready for translation into multiple languages.
Phase 1 Issues
Issues that still need to be resolved:
- getting recording tools to children across the country who don't have XOs
- developing localized activities around interviewing and recording others, and reading/hearing the stories of others
- spreading the word; introducing children, parents, and other teachers to the ideas behind the project and ways to upload and share recorded stories; building networks of Our Stories participants and broadcasters; providing posters about the project to telecenters and radio stations
- improving the usability of web-based recording tools such as the flash interface at http://ourstories.mepemepe.com .
- getting new stories added quickly; recording more stories from the field from OLPC. most stories used in Phase 1 were Museo da Pessoa and UNICEF stories, with new UNICEF recordings in Tanzania and elsewhere.
- getting more buy-in from schools in Nigeria!
Phase 2 plan
In late 2008, a second phase was designed and started, planned to run on the Google Apps platform and to draw a new wave of interested partners and recording groups. The alpha version of the phase 2 site is being put up at http://ourstories.mepemepe.com . It includes a Flash-based interface for recording new stories, and allows direct uploads.
Quick Links
- Our Stories Press Release
- Google "Tech Talk" about Our Stories (video)
Teachers' Guide to Interview Recording
Country Pages
Related Projects
Museum of the Person
The Museum of the Person is a museum in Brasil which focuses among other things on gathering oral and video histories. They have a recording booth at their HQ that anyone can come and use any day of the week, and are contributing some of their existing recorded stories to the Our Stories project. They occasionally set up videobooths in other parts of the country as well.
Our Stories Activity
- see Interview for an OurStories-specific activity
- A version of Record designed to work with build 625 saves the stories out to the filesystem, rather than the datastore, which allows for synchronizing them with a remote server. The current methods of adding stories to the global map involve sending a trusted server's address to the OurStories team.
Stories recorded through any of these methods should be passed on with the metadata listed at OurStoriesXML. At the moment, some of this must be added by hand.
External links
Activity Summary
| Icon: | Sugar icon::Image:Ourstories.svg |
| Genre: | Activity genre::Documents (Read, Write, and Share) |
| Activity group: | ,|x|Activity group::x}} |
| Short description: | [[Short description::Our Stories (http://www.ourstories.org) is a joint project involving OLPC, UNICEF, Google, and others to facilitate children telling their own stories and those of their communities around the world. The basic format will be 3-5 minute audio recordings with geodata, and optional text and images; these will be visualized on maps of the world, and shared publicly over local and global networks.]] |
| Description: | |
| Maintainers: | ,|x|Contact person::x}} |
| Repository URL: | Source code::http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=projects/ourstories |
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| URL from which to download the latest .xo bundle | Activity bundle:: |
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| smoke tested : | |
| test plan available : | |
| test plan executed : | |
| developer response to testing : |
| URL from which to download the last .xo bundle that works with old releases | Activity bundle::http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:OurStories-1.xo |
| Activity version number: | Activity version:: |
| The releases with which this version of the activity has been tested. | ,|x|Software release::x}} |
| Development status: |