An interesting article that came across my Google Alerts this week from The Times Free Press entitled, "Greeting Cards Help to Preserve Family History," describes a scene wherein a family learns about the history of their grandparents' love through asking a simple question at the bedside of their dieing grandmother, an interaction which then caused entrepreneur Christopher Cummings to launch a new tech start up aimed at preserving our familial legacies. The company, greetingStory, is connected to Cummings' original digital storytelling company, PassItDown, but it relies on physical, "old-fashioned" greeting cards with images and prompts on them to gather handwritten information from older relatives, which can then be preserved and displayed digitally.
The whole idea answers a question I've sometimes pondered over myself as I've watched our world grow increasingly digital and as a natural consequence shed many of its traditional physical artifacts. I recall rummaging through old boxes of photos, watching old videos and reading old journals to learn about my family's past as I was growing up. It was a favorite pastime of mine at a certain age, and the #1 way I learned about where I came from. However, in a world where all of our photos are only stored digitally and where our videos are kept anywhere but a cloud server that is lost as soon as we choose not to patronize Apple anymore, how will our offspring look back in time at what our lives used to be like? What artifacts will be available to them? GreetingStory and PassItDown seem to me a great way of preserving these things in both physical and digital form, so that they will not necessarily be lost with the passing of time and fickle nature of a capitalistic society.
As for educational applications, I could see these services being used as a great means of developing students' writing skills while allowing them to reflect on their personal, familial and cultural identities. These services could be used as a way for students to involve their parents and extended relatives in the educational process in a very meaningful and important way, and at the end of the project they would have not only gained very valuable experience in written expression, they would have created an artifact that could serve and honor the family's legacy for many years to come.
The whole idea answers a question I've sometimes pondered over myself as I've watched our world grow increasingly digital and as a natural consequence shed many of its traditional physical artifacts. I recall rummaging through old boxes of photos, watching old videos and reading old journals to learn about my family's past as I was growing up. It was a favorite pastime of mine at a certain age, and the #1 way I learned about where I came from. However, in a world where all of our photos are only stored digitally and where our videos are kept anywhere but a cloud server that is lost as soon as we choose not to patronize Apple anymore, how will our offspring look back in time at what our lives used to be like? What artifacts will be available to them? GreetingStory and PassItDown seem to me a great way of preserving these things in both physical and digital form, so that they will not necessarily be lost with the passing of time and fickle nature of a capitalistic society.
As for educational applications, I could see these services being used as a great means of developing students' writing skills while allowing them to reflect on their personal, familial and cultural identities. These services could be used as a way for students to involve their parents and extended relatives in the educational process in a very meaningful and important way, and at the end of the project they would have not only gained very valuable experience in written expression, they would have created an artifact that could serve and honor the family's legacy for many years to come.
This sounds like such a cool project! My grandmother gave me a book for Christmas a few years ago called "Grandmom's memories to her grandchild" that is filled with information about her life. It was really cool and I loved reading through it and learning more about her life!
ReplyDeleteThis is a great project! We had something a bit similar, it was called the SMILE initiative. We had all the students create greeting cards and cards that were made to aim senior citizens smile, and they were sent to a local nursing home.
ReplyDelete