Monday, July 11, 2005

The workshop is over

The workshop on Interactive Storytelling in Salzburg is over. The participants are leaving today and are leaving their evaluations behind. It was the first workshop organised by the Instructors’ Network in the framework of VociNet, a project funded by the European Commission programme Media. The objective was to get multimedia instructors together and to compare and build curricula.

It was interesting to see that there was a mix of participants. There were multimedia instructors from universities and colleges, instructors from companies and students, writing their thesis. Personally I was surprised by the corporate instructors as we had not targeted them as audience. But the organisers are very happy with them as it showed that there is a potential in the corporate market. Besides the organisers were blessed with very good presenters such as Brunhild Bushoff, Eku Wand, Stefan Goebel, Massimo Catalfo, Elsa Pecourt and Patrick McTaggart, who had something to tell or in the case of Christ Hales had something to entertain the participants. Yes we had almost one presenter per two participants. So it has been very intensive.

Yesterday afternoon the participants were divided in groups and asked to start building on curricula. The discussions were sometimes highly academic, but sometimes also on practical points. How do you market a course on digital storytelling and what do you do when you have the students in the course. Do you need a reader, a book, a database with examples, software to put interactive stories together? In short, a lot of questions will be addressed.

A report on the workshop will be made as well as a reader of the lectures presented and workgroup reports. It will take some time to structure it and get the comments of the participants on the results. But I am sure that some courses in the next academic year will benefit from this workshop.

The next VociNet workshop will be in Tampere, Finland, on November 10-12, 2005. It will be held around the time of Mindtrek, the big multimedia festival with conferences, workshops and international business meetings. The subject will be on production. After that we will have one in Milano and the last one will be in Vienna on March 3-4, during the EUROPRIX Top Talent Award Festival. For me VociNet has become a brand already for workshops and materials intended for multimedia instructors.

No comments: