About this site …
“Dreaming Down Under” is the month-long travelogue of Donna V. Whitmore and Cheryl W. Colan, mother and daughter. Donna and Cheryl are spending the month of July 2004 exploring the indigenous cultures of Australia and New Zealand with a Digital Storytelling class from Scottsdale Community College, Arizona, U.S.A.
The Authors
Cheryl (the daughter)
Cheryl is a documentary filmmaker and works in Media Services at Phoenix College in Phoenix, Arizona, where she will also begin teaching ART100 shortly after returning from this trip. Her passion is telling stories any way and every way: on the web, in print, in film, and in person (yes, she will talk your ear off). Cheryl has wanted to walkabout down under as long as she can remember. Hopefully the ears of the folk there are quite firmly attached.
Donna (the mother)
Donna has recently made the transition from a job in the rat race to early retirement, and it only took her umpteen tries to navigate the U.S. Social Security System. She lives in an historic two-bedroom home in Central Arizona's Verde Valley with her adorable cat, Katie. When Cheryl proposed this trip, Donna's initial response was “whaaat?” followed closely by “where do I sign up?”
Digital Storytelling
What is Digital Storytelling?
Storytelling strenghthens the imagination. To imagine is to envision, to see with the inward eye. This ability to imagine is the basis of all creativity. Creativity is being able to see beyond what is readily apparent. It is seeing a new answer to an old problem.
Carol Birch
Storytelling is the process of getting sensory data from one person's head into another person's head. Digital Storytelling is simply telling a story in a digital format. This can be done with photographs, drawings, video, audio — anything that can be presented in a digital format. If this leaves you confused, explore the digital storytelling links below for further information. And keep reading this site to explore the digital storytelling process vicariously through our experiences.
Digital Storytelling links:
- An interview with our teachers
- Center for Digital Storytelling
- The Digital Storytelling Festival
- The Elements of Digital Storytelling
Technical Details
On the server side …
This site is hosted at Dreamhost. Cheryl and Donna post entries to the site from anywhere they can find Internet access thanks to the Movable Type Personal Publishing System. Our photo albums are powered by Gallery. We also use Dan Benjamin's super cool Random Image Rotator to serve up the random travel ephemera pictures you see at the top of our pages.
Gear and software …
We use the following equipment and software to produce this site from the road:
- Apple 17-inch PowerBook G4
- Nikon Coolpix 3500 Digital Camera with two 256MB Compact Flash cards
- Adobe Photoshop CS
- Optima System’s PageSpinner
Design
The site logo is set in P22 Type Foundry's Parrish font set. Headlines are set in Georgia. Everything else is set in Bitstream Vera Sans, though most will see Verdana. Cheryl does the coding, manages the site, and makes the graphics.
The site design and functionality is heavily influenced by three of Cheryl's favorite weblogs:
Privacy Policy
We take privacy seriously.
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If you sign up to be notified when the site is updated, we will never give out or sell your e-mail address, or use it for any other purpose whatsoever, in perpetuity throughout the universe. We promise.
When you post a comment to an entry, we do require that you provide an e-mail address. However, we do not publish your e-mail address on this site as part of your comment. We require it for our reference only, mainly to discourage riff raff who would anonymously post inappropriate comments.
If you post something we consider inappropriate in a comment, we reserve the right to edit or remove whatever offends. This is our travelogue.
All content (except your comments) copyright © 2004 - 2008 Cheryl W. Colan & Donna V. Whitmore. All Rights Reserved.
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