Slice of Life (Day Five): On the Possibilities of Collaboration

(This is for the Slice of Life challenge, hosted by Two Writing Teachers. We write all through March, every day, about the small moments in the larger perspective … or is that the larger perspective in the smaller moments? You write, too.)

One of my hesitations in jumping into Slice of Life is my participation in something known as Networked Narratives, a ‘course’ being run at Kean University by Mia Zamora and Alan Levine (remotely) which has an open online invitational component, which I am part of. So, this Slice of Life sort of converges with Networked Narratives. That’s a good thing.

My good friend, Wendy, from Australia, has been tinkering with the app Acapella as a way to foster more narrative collaborations with the NetNarr folks, mostly those of us out here in the wide open spaces. The students in the actual course seem a bit more restrained and follow the course’s activity guidelines pretty closely. Out here, we just do what we wanna do. We’re not getting graded, of course.

Anyhoo … Wendy and I have been trying to navigate the potential of the Acapella app, which has strange quirks around collaboration yet has some potential that we find intriguing enough to stay with it. We’ve messaging back and forth, working through the kinks and frustrations.

This is one of our impromptu collaborations.

Next up is an invite to a few more friends (Sandy and Terry) and plan out something a little more creative and focused.

Peace (in collaboration),
Kevin

PS — this is one acapella mix I made myself long ago, when I first tried out the app.

12 Comments
  1. How awesome is it that technology allow us to collaborate with people around the world?? Who knew this would ever be a possibility!

  2. Looking for an invite. Looking for weapons of mass destruction, too. Oy, maybe I got it and din’t realize I had it.

  3. Such a neat app for collaboration! As someone who lives abroad, this app has lots of potential. Thanks for introducing it to us!

  4. Fascinating. I have never seen this. My daughter looked over my shoulder and commented, “Ah, he’s using Acapella.” She has seen it. Not used yet. I am curious now.

  5. This looks like an app I’d toss to a kid and say, “make something and tell me how you like it and how to use it.”

  6. It’s definitely one of those apps that you need to use to understand. I note that a lot of the public examples are ‘selfies’ and after using it, I can see why, it’s easier to control when you are the only one recording! It was built to collaborate! In my corner of the Networked Narratives course I feel the need to connect. Thanks so much, Kevin, as always ready to play along. Look forward to further collaborations.

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