The Organic City is project that allows users to explore what it means to tell stories through the use of new technologies that more and more people have access to. The Organic City project focuses on Lake Merritt and downtown as a framework for this new collection of narratives. The site contains an interactive map, allowing visitors to pinpoint where the stories, poems and what-have-you take place.

There are 18 different categories to chose from, including action-adventure, mystery, nature, comedy, love and historical. Submissions from users can be in the form of text, audio or video from mobile devices and through the internet.

The way that I see it, this project will allow users to explore the relationships between place, story and community, as well as the ways in which new technologies are going to enhance our experience of these important components of human identity.

This project is very similar to the chosen topic of Organic City. It uses the same concept of people in a community to contribute stories about a location through the use of Web 2.0 technologies. The project employs technologies like Google maps, AJAX and Mashup application and is totally dependent on users to contribute to the contents in this project.

An interesting feature that is being tested out on this project is the History Line. It traces the stories submitted by users and would try to link these stories together if there is any connection between them. One story can be linked to another version of a story submitted by another friend or even stranger. This is almost similar to social networking sites like Friendster or Facebook except that it is done through the use of personal stories.

It is interesting to see that the use of new media is beginning to change the way stories are being told traditionally and the power of technology can really have a huge impact on storytelling. As this marriage of technology and traditional storytelling takes place, we could see network of stories and people taking form in different communities around the world.

http://eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00008985/01/8985.pdf

The topic i choose will revolve around the idea of users contributing content to a storytelling website. Through technologies like wordpress, users will be able to share stories (in their community) with each other. The website will target a specific community and will allow users to post stories (blog or video) that are happening in a particular area of the community.

This is my second semester into the graduate program of instructional technology. Before I started it, I hardly had any idea what instructional technology was but now, after all the lectures and the assignments, I think I finally have a good grasp of it and am excited about the unlimited potential about it.

With globalization, we are living in a much smaller world and interacting with each other becomes more important and convenient. Being an instructional technology designer, he/she’s major role is to come up with a set of rules and design in order to realize the interaction. One application is to provide training for staff in a branch office thousands of miles away.