Head to our new home, COMMUNITY EXPRESSIONS: http://community-expressions.com

As my work has evolved away from setting up centers for community digital exploration and into the heart of storytelling approaches for community building, the Digital Explorations website, as wonderful as it is, doesn’t quite capture the feel and scope of Community Expressions. And so, I am moving all new posts and links to a new website home, Community Expressions, and hope you will visit me there. I will keep this site up in case you want to get some ideas about setting up third spaces of the Digital Explorations sort.

Watch the video:

Storytelling for Community Planning – Training Video from Orton Family Foundation on Vimeo.

Watch the slideshow:

Being the daughter of a historian who spent his life researching, writing, and teaching about the early days of this country, I’m naturally thinking back today as I look out over the fields I call home…to the rich history of Vermont and its role in the country’s story, its public figures from Ethan Allen to Patrick Leahy, its deep land ethic, its commitment to social justice, its hardscrabble farmers then and now. I’m thinking about the Champlain Valley where I live, celebrating this month the quadricentennenial of Samuel de Champlain’s voyage and our connection to New France and Quebec.

Read the rest of the post.

Summer at Digital Explorations

We offer a sampling of our innovative, experiential workshops here in our Vermont barn. If you’re interested in exploring the rich promise of storytelling and social media join us. Be inspired by our surroundings and our creative exercises and expertise. We tailor our workshops to meet the needs and interests of our participants.

Ask us about our Workshops-to-Go!

Connections, Conversation and Creativity: A Social & Expressive Media Workshop July 8 – 10

How do we harness the connective and creative potential of online practices in our communities? How do we move beyond simple information sharing to fostering creativity and sustained collaboration? In three days of discussion and hands-on activities, we cover a range of social and expressive media practices to enhance communication and collaboration, to foster creative culture, and to engage our communities actively in our work. Limited to 10

Storytelling in Our Communities July 30 – August 1 October 1 -3

In this workshop, we explore storytelling in community-based efforts. We help participants design storytelling projects for civic engagement and participation, using a range of old and new media to enhance bonds and build bridges across community while creating a vision for the future. We cover traditional and digital storytelling methods in an experiential, fun-filled three days. Limited to 10

The Whole Story: Deep Creativity and Balance August 6 – 8 September 17 – 19

During three days of storytelling, movement and meditation, we will deepen our practice as artists, activists and citizens. Learn to listen deeply and actively, to share stories, and to incorporate the serious play of creativity into your life. Workshop Leaders: Barbara Ganley and Cynthia Fuller-Kling

Workshop Leaders:

Barbara Ganley, Director and Founder of Digital Explorations. Known for her energy, her creative exercises, and her deep knowledge in the field, Barbara brings over twenty years of teaching writing and creative thinking, and eight years working in the worlds of social media and digital storytelling to our workshops. Read more about her on our About Us page. Remy Mansfield, Storytelling Fellow. Remy brings his great skill in digital storytelling, in designing and leading storytelling workshops for youth, and his gifts as a photographer to the workshop setting. Read more about him here. Cynthia Fuller-Kling: Cynthia joins us for The Whole Story workshops this year. A former modern dancer, she has been a noted yoga teacher for twenty years and artist who draws upon movement, photography, video and language in her installations and performances.

Daily Schedule for All Workshops:

9:00 -noon Morning session noon-1:00 Lunch 1:00 – 4:00 p.m. Afternoon Session

Location:

Tucked away at the end of a long dirt driveway, and yet just two miles from the center of Middlebury, Vermont, you’ll find our barn studio, fields and patios set in glorious surroundings with pastoral views reaching to both the Green Mountains and the Adirondacks. Workshops meet in the barn studio and porch, and, as weather permits, out on the nearly 70 acres around us. At the end of the day, you’ll have time to explore the countryside (lakes, mountains, villages) by foot, bike or car.

Lodging & Meals:

For overnight accommodation, many charming inns and bed & breakfasts dot the area. Contact us for recommendations. As a college town, Middlebury has an array of dining options. We will cook and eat together the first evening; Digital Explorations will provide local-ingredient based lunches.

Costs:

$400 per three-day workshop includes all instruction and materials, three lunches and one dinner. Lodging not included. Take a peek at our setting through this Flickr slide show. For more information: Email: Barbara@digitalexploration.org Phone: 802 989 1885

With Orton, we are exploring the potential role of storytelling, both traditional and digital forms, in community engagement efforts. Damariscotta has experimented with story circles and story interviews thus far as ways to bring the community together and to give everyone a voice in planning for the town’s future. Sharing stories about our connections to a place, our experiences in that place, our personal hopes for the future of that place slows us down enough to look carefully at what we value in our communities, and invites us to listen deeply to one another, to create bonds and bridges within our communities, and to work towards creative, collaborative solutions to the challenges of our times. Digital Explorations trained the story gatherers, and edited the clips and photos into this digital story to provide a brief glimpse into the project. These first-round story interviews explored residents’ connections to the town.

We’ve made it–onto our website–after a couple of years of dreaming from inside the walls of higher education about a different model of learning: townspeople coming together online and in person to share their collected expertise, their community-based projects, their processes through connecting, creating, collaborating and conversing–here, in town, online, and all over the country! From talking through the possibilities with The Fab Fearless Five and convincing my fabulous board and staff to join me in this adventure, to securing our first contracts and collaborations, I am thrilled by the response to our vision for bringing storytelling (both old and new), connective strategies (both old and new), and Centers for Community Digital Exploration into the heart of rural downtowns. We’d love to hear your feedback, your ideas, your wisdom. Let us know where you come across like-minded adventurers. We’ll keep you updated as to our news and projects, including our reflections on our work, our discoveries out there in the blogosphere, and our plans for future directions. Please wander about the site, read all about us, and let us know what you think!

On April 14, we led a workshop, on planning community storytelling projects, for Orton Family Foundation in Starksboro, Vermont as part of their Art & Soul Project, an initiative to use art to enhance civic engagement in rural communities as they plan for their future. View the slides from the workshop here: