Slow going....

Not so happy with my progress....

Inter-tribal Skyping...
Well, promised to outline my projects for you. I began with one and expanded it to two new projects: Setting up a Skype network between several Yavapai speaking tribes and building a social networking system for a digital storytelling grant project.

First the Skype Project. In many American Indian nations, language loss is at a critical juncture. Here in Camp Verde, Yavapai language loss is serious, with few fluent speakers. Apache is in a slightly better condition, but speakers are diminishing. In both culture areas, there are advisory committees, study groups, and coalitions intended to moderate the problem. Yavapai Culture belongs to a coalition that included Camp Verde, Prescott Yavapai, and Fort McDowell Yavapai.

While at a conference in November, the culture managers were impressed with speakers who were Skyped in from various countries. They want to do it. In this way they could have study groups without the extensive travel they now exercise.

I began to set it up and immediately encountered some problems.
* Low bandwidth in the immediate area of our offices
* Skype for the MAC only works on the latest operating system (don't have it)
* While I planned to operate from an iMac, it has no VGA or DVI output.

While I worried about tribal computer policies disallowing Skyping, this turned out to be OK. Still working on the problems.


Second Project...

I am currently working on a National Endowment for the Humanities grant project with NAU. In this project we will be working with eight Indian Nations in Arizona: Navajo, Hope, Yavapai-Apache, Zuni, and two others. The project will work with youth and elders to create digital stories related to oral history, and share them between Nations.

The grant proposal was close last year and has recently been resubmitted. One suggestion from the reviewers was to disseminate the stories through social networking. Thus, we will likely be using uTube, Facebook and other systems of communication. The first stage of this will be a blog... see link at right for "A Basketful of Stories. My intent is for tabbed pages, like our course blog (Havn't figured that out yet) with an over view of project (its there), comments from the project manager, project director George Gummerman, and myself, the storytelling facilitator.

As Todd and Thatcher are laboring their way out of the Grand Canyon, I will just have to wait to figure out about those tabs.