The Center for Digital Storytelling engages people to share personal stories, bearing witness as related to their lives leading to action and positive change.
Narratives and frames are powerful things. It would seem that any endeavor would benefit from knowing what is a compelling "story" to engage the public. Youth development organizations use this tool quite a lot in their work.
I remember you had been talking about using story boards in one of the other cases. I am wondering if there is a way to use both of those ideas for Case 4.
University of Houston, College of Education has lead a digital storytelling effort that strives to expose instructors and students to the educational opportunities that the technique provides.
Doing good things better is Brian's latest book. He is prolific and in this book he describes the discipline of daily writing that he used to write this book (and previous work) -- and that he leads his students to use. The principles of daily writing are given in brief at http://www.faculty.umb.edu/pjt/DailyWriting.html.
Looking at Brian's website of writing, you will find material on activism, especially around developments in science and technology, but not only this.
So a couple of these annotated resources are seeming to point to the need for compelling and clear stories and communication. That would be interesting to follow up. And not just the dissemination of ideas, but the support for dialogue and deliberation.
In this editorial from the October 2010 volume of "Science," Bruce Alberts suggests a system of STEM (science, technology, mathematics, and engineering) merit badges for children ages 5-18 to earn awards in schools. He compares this system both to the system used by the Boy and Girl Scouts, and to the system of AP (Advanced Placement) courses currently used in high schools today. It is suggested that this will help students maintain the curiosity they feel towards science in the early years into their high school careers, by when children have often lost interest.
I've recently come to the term STEAM which ads "art" into the traditional STEM equation. I also found this link while doing this quick research - http://ilandsymposium.wordpress.com/2010/08/28/art-science-activism-and-bicycles/. This combined with Rhoda's post about Digital Storytelling makes me wonder what role creativity (from stories to visualizations) play in this equation.
Not being familiar at all with STEM, I am interested in seeing what connections might be found with further inquiry into how stories and the way they are shared can have an effect on positive change, education and personal connections to issues that often seem too big.