Recently I had the pleasure of attending a workshop with the Center for Digital Storytelling. These guys are fabulous – very caring and knowledgeable individuals that in this case managed to draw out beautiful, personal, moving stories from each of the dozen attendees. Even more impressive, they shepherded us into making them finished videos in only 3 days.

It was a crazy adventure for me because I was trying to subvert the system and do something that could be useful for the intensive Digital Arts & Community course I'm teaching next month with FireHawk for Hartnell College, down in Salinas Valley. I didn't think the "personal story" form that Center for Digital Storytelling is geared towards was going to work for that purpose, but as it turned out doing anything less would not have been taking advantage of their wisdom and skill. It also probably wouldn't have been as good as what I ended up with, either. Have a look – it's only 2 1/2 minutes – but be sure to stay through the end, where there's a little surprise: