Showing posts with label digital scrapbooks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label digital scrapbooks. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

A new blog coming on?

Sometimes it's like an itch you can't scratch, but I've been thinking about a new blog--would be my 13th I think. However, I have several I've not been keeping up, like my hobby bloggy on first issue magazines (I must have hundreds), what's on my bookshelves, coffee shop conversations (some are too wild to repeat), and the class reunion (it was 2 years ago).

The other day I scanned something for the class reunion blog. It was an award I'd earned in 8th grade for reading and was given at graduation. I had no memory of this or the books we read, and no one has responded to my questions. Surely I wasn't the only kid who got one of these? Total silence. But while I was rummaging around in the basement storage area, I again pulled out grandma Mary's box of clippings, papers and scrapbooks. And I could feel it coming on. . . a web log devoted to paper memorabilia.


Also just this morning I found a really nice blogger dot com template web site. I haven't looked at all the possibilities yet, but lots of variety and good design.

Maybe I could do it just for a month the way I did Memory Patterns in November 2005.

Thursday, September 03, 2009

25 styles of blogging

Here's one for those of you who think you can't write a blog, or who just go anonymously to write comments at those blogs you don't like. 25 basic styles of blogging . I do most of them--some several times a day! Life blogging. Piggyback blogging. Guest Blogs. Memes. Events. Book reviews. And so forth. I didn't know anyone was keeping track or naming these styles. Must be librarians.

I came across the More Things on a Stick web site while poking around the topic "digital storytelling." I'd like to explain why this is important in academe, but haven't been able to figure out why it is all the rage. There was a workshop at Ohio State this summer. A former colleague, Karen Diaz, has written a book on its use in libraries. I can't learn anything in 2-3 minutes, especially not on video.

My grandmother Mary was a scrapbooker in childhood--began with pretty postcards and advertisements probably before she could read and then moved on to clipping cute sayings, recipes, and stories and pasting them into the old account books of her father to save on paper. I used her scrapbooks to determine what magazines and newspapers a 19th century farm family read. I would love to be able to lift some and read great-grandfather's farm accounts, but whatever homemade glue she used is like cement. Then my mother kept a "commonplace book" for years in a small 3-ring notebook of items she liked and clipped out of magazines. After her death, my niece Julie photocopied it and so its poetry, cartoons and stories from the 1940s through the 1970s were shared with a wider audience of grandchildren.

And of course, I blog. Eleven, or is it twelve, blogs. But digital story telling? Now that sounds like all work and no fun, and not enough writing.