When I first met and began working with Joe and Nina Lambert from the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley, California I knew that I had found a dynamic yet peaceful tool for revolution delivered by competent warriors. For me, Digital Storytelling is about confronting and replacing the dominant consumer driven media machine that provides only a one-way relationship with a more honest venue by using the same corporate technologies to empower individuals and groups as they tell their own stories concerned with their own histories and neighborhoods. As activist, teacher and poet I experience Digital Storytelling as a good reason to return to the town plaza and find out what’s really going on.

      The main goal of my workshops is for people to learn by direct experience the power of telling personal stories using contemporary media as a vehicle for building self esteem, preserving culture and bridging gaps. Participants in the workshops are provided with state-of-the-art software applications and hands-on training in the use of these tools.

Our primary focus, however, is on the creation of a “poem-sized” story which is written and recorded by the participants and provides the narrative for their digital movie. Material from their “digital scrap book” such as old photos, audio recordings including music and even small clips of video along with title pages and a variety of transitions and effects are then compiled on a time line just as in the making of larger movies. At the end of the workshop, and after much hard work and mutual support from other “storytellers”, participants take turns viewing one another’s creations and are then given a CD with their digital story which is usually 3 to 5 minutes in length.

      Operating from this same basis of simplicity and honesty I also co-create multimedia presentations as vehicles for sharing about organizations and businesses which promote and serve humanistic values. With intentions of respect and collaboration the new digital technologies can become useful tools instead of false gods.

      The distinction between exploitation and sharing with people should be clear to anyone and yet it seems important to repeatedly take the time to anchor ourselves and our projects in values that are uplifting and mutually respectful. For this reason when I work with people I ask them to consider not only what story needs to be told, but for what reason, and to what end. Simple questions like these can often facilitate a shift from old paradigm advertising to more responsible expressions that take into consideration the quality of our survival in this new millennium. After all, storytelling, like other expressions is a responsibility in which we create our understanding of the world and offer it to others.