2/6〜2/10 Mobile Story Collector WS in Manila

Yonnie Kim, a member of MoDe, held a mobile storytelling workshop in Manila, the Philippines from Feb 7 to Feb 9, 2011. As a collaborative scheme with d’CATCH program, MoDe set a “Mobile Story Collector” booth at its venue in the University of Santo Tomas. In the booth, international participants from the Philippines, Thai and China were invited to join to a storytelling activity on their mobile media experiences. Basically as an extension of the previous action research, the workshop was designed for a cross-cultural performance ethnography on mobile media literacy.

In the first part of the activity, participants were invited to find a unique word to describe their experiences with own mobile phones. Then, they were asked to visualize the word by body expression such as making a face, a gesture or performance. Participants’ expressions were taken photos and displayed on iPad photo frame on the spot. Finally, participants made a verbal reflection why they chose the word and matched it with such body expression.
More than 30 young participants joined to the creative activity to present individual experiences with their own mobile media. Meaningful reflections were also made on varying aspects surrounding digital media from their versatility in everyday lives to a self-identical attachment to the mobile phone as a personal belonging.

This workshop program is recommendable as a simple and easy activity on mobile media literacy. It also seems very useful for a cross-cultural approach as it is basically counting on a non-verbal performance, which is a universal communication means in any cultural context.
(Reported by Yonnie Kim)