Story Sharing

So far, it has been a ‘normal’ Saturday morning in Braidwood … apart from the jet lag from our recent trip to England and New York.
‘Normal’ here in Braidwood for me involves an early morning catch up with feeds and links from friends around the world. Two of these global prompts set me off thinking about story sharing.
A Medium alert brought me Elizabeth Woyke’s news of a Cisco archive project. I added her post to the growing list of #UCSIA15 reads (now up to 147 links to informatics and analytics articles). Included in the Cisco archive are a number of oral histories (70 to date) that have “unearthed surprising, compelling stories”.
A second prompt about story sharing came from Bryn Evans. He shared a pre-publication copy of a paper he has written to outline an ethnomethodological approach to sport coaching. His paper uses conversation analysis to explore coaching contexts and he shares a story of basketball coaching to exemplify his approach.
His work took me back to a story I shared about Anush and basketball fever in 1992. I think the stories Bryn and I share have a polysemic quality available in qualitative accounts.
Perhaps my global reading primed me for a delightful local meeting this morning. It is Farmers’ Market day in Braidwood. It is a great place to meet friends and catch up with the week’s news.
Today I was delighted to meet Alannah Magee. She was leaving as I was arriving but we did manage a ten-minute conversation that included her news of sharing stories. Alannah is the Marketing Manager of the Sportsmans Warehouse. I met Alannah for the first time four years ago through an introduction from The Old Cheese Factory at Reidsdale. This led to Alannah speaking with one of my classes in Business, Politics and Sport in 2011.

In this morning’s conversation, Alannah told me about her story project. This is driven by a desire to connect communities through sport particularly through a commitment to equity and fairness. There is a Sportsmans Warehouse video channel that hosts these stories. I enjoyed Grace’s story as an example of what is possible with this kind of sharing.

This blog post is an extension of a ‘normal’ day in Braidwood. An opportunity to connect global and local events.

Photo Credits

Braidwood Breakfast (Keith Lyons, CC BY 4.0)
ACT Cricket (Alannah Magee with Alana Ryan, no copyright specied)