Shown Above: Lucretia Fraga

During a lunch meeting, I had a fascinating conversation with Lucretia Fraga (pictured above) regarding the Academy for Teacher Excellence. Lucretia is serving as an instructional technologist affiliated with the University of Texas at San Antonio and was interested in how to use Moodle with over 80 educators from multiple districts in and around San Antonio. Right now, their current solution is Blackboard/WebCT; I strongly encouraged her to use Moodle, discussing the Questionnaire and Book modules as necessities. There may be a partnership here since teachers from San Antonio districts are involved.

In the course of the conversation, Lucretia was kind enough to share some of her travels that are a part of a digital storytelling initiative in South Africa. I was particularly enthralled by the focus on mobile phones to share college course information, the development of books in indigenous language (apparently, 11 languages in use over there and folks are quadri-lingual or more!) that are being prepared in Quark format for publication.

I was also engaged by the oral storytelling that goes on in South Africa, how every year there is a storytelling festival and people shares stories and poems that capture their experience. “Is anyone recording those?” I asked, and Lucretia pointed out that that was one of her questions as well. Often, no! The stories are broadcast via radio. Dr. Maria Kaylor apparently provided the professor leading the storytelling effort–I can’t pronounce, much less, spell, his name–with a digital storytelling kit, including a FLIP camera, an iAudio digital audio recorder and more, but imagining what great stories are not being recorded was maddening as I sat across from Lucretia, hearing her tell her experiences in South Africa.

One of the interesting stories is that, apparently, Around the Corner Blog is read in South Africa! What a thrill to find out that educators are reading about Digital Storytelling via the Around the Corner Blog that I write here in San Antonio.

Of course, I had all my podcasting equipment with me but Rosario’s Mexican Restaurant is a bit loud for recording anything, so I had to settle for a quick snapshot of Lucretia.

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