Storybird: Create your Digital Stories

Thanks to the Free Technology for Teachers blog, I have discovered a great collaborative storytelling website called Storybird.

Storybird allows anyone to create picture book stories using existing templates. You can chose from a very wide variety of art works. This is of course a perfect tool to work with children but even for adults. I very much enjoyed writing my little story, Home (see below), and I intend to write some more. Mainly to exercise myself, as I'm seriously considering working with an illustrator/artist when I will have a clearer idea of what I'd like to write for this kind of medium. However, I am not ready yet for such an adventure so I will start with these "storybirds," because that will be one way of learning, but also sharing. So I would urge you to try it out, alone or with your kid, and if you don't have children -like me- get the one living inside of you. Enjoy!

Home on Storybird

Stranger Festival in Amsterdam

Some 50 young people and 25 teachers from the schools I am working with on the INDIE project are now here in Amsterdam and actively participating to the Stranger Festival organised by the European Cultural Foundation. I've been working on this partnership for months and I am really happy to see how productive, dynamic and hard working our young people are.
If you are interested in video have a look at the Stranger Festival website and don't miss the Stranger Award Show Live broadcast tomorrow at 20:30.

Elif Shafak's Journey Between Languages bis

Remember I had written about Elif Shafak's autobiographical novel Siyah Süt some time ago on this blog (see post An Ode to Women). The novel has now been translated into French at the Phebus Publishing House, the editor Daniel Arsand talks about Lait Noir on a Fnac Live video on You Tube. I wonder if it will be translated into English as well.

For the non French speakers among you, Shafak's novel Ask (which I didn't enjoy reading but was a huge success in Turkey) will be out in English under the title The Forty Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi). The most interesting about this latest novel is the journey Shafak is doing between languages (see my previous post about her love of languages). Ask and The Forty Rules of Love show yet another crazy journey for the writer. Shafak has first written the novel in English, then it has been translated into Turkish by a translator. Shafak then took the translation and rewrote the novel. When the Turkish version was ready, she went back to the English version and rewrote it with a new spirit. She explains in an interview to Today's Zaman that she has "built two parallel books in the same span of time" She adds: "It is a bit insane, I have to admit. It is a crazy amount of work. I do this because language is my passion." And this is why, despite the fact that I don't always enjoy all her writings, I think Elif Shafak is an amazingly productive writer who can cross a lot of boundaries using languages.

Edinburgh Showcase 2009

I'm in Edinburgh the whole week and I will be blogging about performances and events I will attend from 24 to 29 August. Follow My Week at the Edinburgh Showcase blog if you are interested in performing arts!

Remember 17 August 1999

Ten years ago Turkey was living a tragedy. Official figures say 17,480 died, 23,781 were wounded and 285,211 residences were damaged (see the earthquake's wikipedia page in Turkish). Unofficial sources talk about 50,000 deaths and more than 100,000 wounded. Whichever are the right figures, the reality was that hundreds of thousands people lost way too much during the big Marmara Earthquake on 17 August 1999: their lives, their loved ones, their homes, parts of their body, their work, their trust...

Another big earthquake is expected in the same region, it can happen today, tomorrow or any time within the next decades. Yes, it is a natural disaster human beings cannot fight against. But we should be prepared. We should start by not building houses made of sand (shells were found in the building wreck at the time!!!). Government regulations on building need to be stronger and more importantly, it needs to be followed. Rescue teams should be ready at any time. Hospitals should be ready to host everyone. It is too easy to say that nature or God had its say and that there is nothing we can do about it. That's just too easy. We cannot stop an earthquake, but we can make sure that we don't lose hundreds of thousands of lives when one comes our way. And we must not forget the tragedy of ten years ago, not to cry our souls out and feel good about it, but to make sure every single citizen remembers when time comes to vote that they choose the ones that will care about their citizens' well being. And if you wonder what might happen next time, read Mine G. Kirikkanat's novel Bir gün, gece (translated into French as La malédiction de Constantin). Because reality can be scary doesn't mean we don't have to face it.

A Novel that Waxes Off Stereotypes

Three young women are meeting once a month to get their legs (and other parts of their body) waxed. They live in the Netherlands, they have a strong friendship and they talk freely about their choices in life: about their career, their lifestyle, their fears, their love stories and about sex. No, it's not the story of Carrie and her friends teleported to the land of the wooden shoes, and it's not an orientalist depiction of an escape from the Harem. De Harsclub, translating literally as "The Wax Club" is the story of Bahar -single girl living with her parents, Arzu -independent flight attendant living alone, and Yelda -married to the "perfect" husband. Stereotypes? No.

Senay Özdemir's novel goes far beyond its "Mediterranean Chick lit" label and its unoriginal cover. De Harsclub is a sincere novel and it is why it's such a pleasure to read. The author doesn't try to manipulate your thoughts about a certain community. In this novel, like in real life, Mediterranean/Turkish/Muslim women do care about and have a life full of fun, love, success and sex, and that is just ... natural. No stereotypical depiction of the "non Western" woman caught in the terrible-web-of-her-so-thought-doomed-culture. Being herself of Turkish descent, Senay Özdemir has a legitimate voice to tell the story of these three young women of Turkish origin living in the Netherlands. Because indeed, having Turkish roots does influence their thoughts and action, and it does shape their identity. But it does not ipso facto imply that they are trying to escape from an-OTHER world. These women are perfectly feeling in harmony with their identity, because it is composed by more than just nationality or tradition. Arzu, Bahar and Yelda are before everything else women, and Özdemir does not feel she needs to justify their needs, their passions, their stories, in any way. She doesn't have to and it feels so good. I recognized myself in these characters, I also recognized my mother, my aunt and my girlfriends, all with their own backgrounds, all with their own identities, all sharing stories of life as women, in their own way. I enjoyed their company and moreover, I enjoyed not having been put in a box again.

De Harsclub, by Senay Özdemir (Archipel Amsterdam - Antwerpen, 185 pages). In Dutch.
Senay Özdemir's blog: http://senayozdemir.blogspot.com/

The Power of Storytelling

For those of you who understand French, I would urge you to listen to Le Monde's "Ma première nuit en France" series. The title means "My first night in France" and on each recording, one person is telling his or her own first night in France. Whether they came to France to settle or just to visit, they all have something to say, and they are all worth listening to.

Abdellah tells about his "rêve de pauvre" (dream of the poor) to become a writer, a filmmaker, "all these activities which are not serious things when you are poor", he says, "they don't feed you". Jenny, a British teacher coming from Greece, arrives at 24 and finds herself sheltered on her first-almost-homeless-night by a colleague she just meets. Mikaël comes from the USA and explains how he voiced "Messieurs Dames je vous aime" in the middle of a café, the only sentence he could say in French at the time. His story gets funnier when he tells about how he and his friend released exotic birds from cages on his landlord's balcony at 4am. Angelika tells about her experience as a 16 year old tourist seeing Paris for the first time with her boyfriend -and whose parents have arranged them to stay in separate bedrooms at a small hotel in the romantic city. She has been drawing her vision of Paris from the literature of Simone de Beauvoir and Victor Hugo, and spent her first night wondering about the all night screaming cat she thought was a tortured baby. Margani arrives to France from Somalia to study. He tells how anxious he was to fail "because I didn't know any French". The street where he lived in Mogadishu was so full of life he thought Paris would be even livelier, but on his first night he saw the city empty and thought "Morgani, you are dead!", then he tells how he slept on top of the bed with his clothes on because he didn't realise he could get inside the bed and sleep comfortably wrapped in the blanket.

There is something so powerful in telling stories. Even the simplest, most anecdotal ones, when told with sincerity, can deeply touch. So far you can listen online to the stories of Abdellah, Jenny, Mikaël, Angelika and Margani. Each of them funny, poignant, passionate, they all, in their own way, tell the story of a discovery.

More stories will be told throughout the summer on Le Monde's "Ma première nuit en France" series.

Young People, Get your Mobile Phones!

I have been heavily involved in the creation of a competition for young people within the project I am currently working on, called Inclusion and Diversity in Education (INDIE). Getting ideas from my previous job experience and having seen what great things come out of films made with a mobile phone... I have thought that it would be great to ask the young people in secondary schools to make films with their mobile phones about diversity in their school, home and everyday life. Luckily the people I am working with on this project loved the idea and we developed it together: INDIE goes Mobile is now launched! The competition info and rules exist in several languages as it is open to all secondary school students in 9 European countries. So young people, get your mobile phones and show us how you see diversity!

Literary Boston and New York

I've been willing to write about my trip to Boston and New York City a while ago. It's been a month now that I'm back but it's not too late to share some great literary moments I had there.

Bookshop on the corner of Bleecker and 11th Street, New York City

First let me start with Boston, a city full of culture and history where I was to attend the Media in Transition conference at MIT. I've attended several panels on different topics.
The first panel was about Digital Classrooms and Digital Curricula, there's been very fruitful and necessary discussions about collaborative education and teacher training on new technologies. Students may be digital natives, but most of the teachers aren't. A clear emphasis on knowing rather than knowledge (don't think knowledge is only in your brain) has been put forward so to go towards a more participatory culture. "Classrooms don't have walls anymore" was one of the messages about the possibilities given by new media & technologies to use in education. The second panel I've been to was Race, Nationality and the Digital Technologies with 4 very interesting papers that I would suggest you have a look if interested in the topic. The use of the internet has been analysed from Black communities in the USA to Aboriginal communities in Canada. One paper has also presented how hate speech, which was mostly spread through underground media (flyers, meetings...) in the recent past, has been reaching a much wider audience, expanding globally, being very active on social networking and in the cyberspace. The Databases, Encyclopedias, Archives panel has been focusing a lot on history, on digital approaches to history, and on the evolution of the encyclopedia and the emergence of wikipedia. The last panel I've been to was Fiction and Media Change. Since the last few months, I've been more and more interested in the emergence of a "new" literature, with authors not afraid of using new technologies in their narratives, or even to write for different types of media than the printed book (the Penguin project "We Tell Stories" is one great example of the possibilities offered by new media to tell stories). These various possibilities haven't been really discussed in the panel, staying more focused on literary theory and other comparisons between the novel and the cinema for example. There is thus still a lot more to share and to explore, so do have a look at the titles of the papers, most of them available online (see the list and links at the end of this post). After MIT, a visit to Harvard was of course compulsory, and so to the wonderful bookstores all around Cambridge. The Boston Public Library was stunning, and the lovely Boston Athanaeum has been a great discovery.

Boston Public Library

New York has also its load of culture and literature. It's the fourth time I went to New York and never really took the opportunity to enter the Public Library, which I did this time and couldn't understand why I didn't put such a great place in my list together with the MET, MOMA and other landmarks (seeing it from outside is not enough). I've been quite moved seeing the Gutenberg Bible.

One of the 48 copies of the Gutenberg Bible, New York Public Library

And last but not least, I could enjoy the PEN World Voices Festival in New York, which I wanted to go to for such a long time. I've had the chance to meet and listen to authors I really like, among them Laila Lalami, Neil Gaiman and Shaun Tan. I've also discovered many wonderful authors, and I had to come to New York to discover a Dutch author of children book from Amsterdam, Marieken Jongman. I told her I would attend events she will be in when back in Amsterdam.

Neil Gaiman, Marieken Jongman and Shaun Tan at the PEN Voices

And here are the signed books, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits by Laila Lalami and Tales from Outer Suburbia by Shaun Tan, both wonderful books:

You can read all the papers of the panelists on the MIT6 website. Here are the panels I've referred to above:
Digital Classrooms and Digital Curricula

Jami Carlacio, Lance Heidig, Teaching Digital Literacy Digitally Julio Gonzalez-Appling, Technology as a Bridge in the 21st-Century Classroom Bernadette Longo, Using Social Networks and Mobile Technologies to Enhance the Classroom Space Alice Robison, New Media Literacies by Design: The Game School
Race, Nationality and Digital Technologies
John Edward Campbell, From Barbershop to BlackPlanet: The Construction of Hush Harbors in Cyberspace
Kate Hennessy, Repatriation, Digital Cultural Heritage, and the (Re)Production of Meaning in a Canadian Aboriginal Community
Adam Klein, A Space for Hate: The White Power Movement’s Adaptation in Cyberspace
Nancy van Leuven, The New Mediated Environment of American Indians
Databases, Encyclopedias, Archives
Paul Arthur, History in Motion: Digital Approaches to the Past
Erinc Salor, Encyclopedic Endeavor and the Internet
Peter Walsh, The Uses of Catastrophe: Ninveh, Layard, and the Future of Knowledge
Fiction and Media Change
Jonathan Butler, Novel Obligations: The Future of Fiction in the Digital Age
Staffan Ericson, Death at Broadcasting House
Joanne McNeil, New Media in Fiction: Why the Novel’s Protagonist Never Plays with his iPhone
Annika Olsson, Narratives of Literature in Print and Cyberspace

Perihan Mağden's Two Girls

I've been deeply touched by a very strong novel: İki Genç Kızın Romanı ("The novel of two girls", translated by Brendan Freely and published as Two Girls in English), by Turkish author and columnist Perihan Mağden. The novel has also been adapted to the cinema by Kutluğ Ataman. I like Mağden because she speaks/writes her mind, and in Turkey, this is not an easy task. She is of course criticized by many and has even been prosecuted by the Turkish government because of the views she expressed on mandatory military service. In this novel, Mağden depicts the lives of two teenage girls in Istanbul. The polar tone of the novel strengthens the feeling of oppression, especially for a girl in a male dominant environment. The force of Mağden's third person omniscient narration also lies in the encounter of these two characters, the angry Behiye and the naive Handan. Both girls are coming from very distinct backgrounds: Behiye is the sister of an older brother and the daughter of a conservative family she hates, and Handan is the unique daughter of a prostitute she loves. Since the very moment they meet, Behiye sees Handan as her saviour: the beautiful girl who will save her from her life, her brother, her mother who cries all the time... Behiye hates life, she doesn't like herself much either, until she finds Handan and grabs her to the core. Their bond is beyond friendship and sisterhood, it is almost amorous. The murders of boys happening all around Istanbul together with Behiye's unreasonable attitude and open hatred against the world (especially towards men) intensify the sense of danger and threat. This impossible relationship is told in an incredibly honest and down to earth language. The word plays are brilliant (and I guess a real challenge to translate). This is an excellent work of contemporary literature and I believe quite original in the current Turkish literary scene.

The cover of the Turkish edition of the novel published by Merkez Kitapçılık ve Yayıncılık (Istanbul, June 2006, 255 pages)