The group project was always going to be some sort of reflection of the different way life has gone in the past year – if it didn’t turn up in the subject, it would be in our methods or just turn up as one of the challenges. In more normal times we might have discussed this over a drink or something to eat but in the end we collaborated on something having never met. As a result, initial lofty ideas for explorations of social media dynamics and the like went out the window and we decided to just embrace this for what it was – bringing together our thoughts and work into a single stream that we could make work.
Trying to make it as easy as possible for thoughts to align, I suggested taking the topic of a review of our year and using the StoryMap platform. It would have the interactivity of a timeline but allow for the creativity that we might see more readily in podcasts, for example. A point on the map allows complete creative control and the StoryMap platform also allows html, facilitating more dynamic content if required. And we were responsible for our own content, so no real need for numerous video calls to check the quality of the work…
If we picked the topic to make it easier on ourselves, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the results. I had initially thought we could file this under digitial publishing and digital creativity but looking at the result, I’m reminded of one of the initial topics we covered, a domain of one’s own. Our storymap is personal to all of us but our thoughts do not have to go through a social media lens or be judged. There is no “like” or “retweet” and if somebody wishes to use the comment box, there is no danger of the content going viral so there’s a good chance those comments will be free of a hidden agenda. Honestly, being able to share content of such a personal nature in this way is liberating.
