Our Stories
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Contents
About
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.
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.
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
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.
