The presentation defines digital storytelling, reviews the learning benefits for college students, and offers sample projects and approaches.
For more info, such as links to playable versions of sample stories as well as other versions of the presentation (including one that has over 20,000 views!), see:
http://digitalwriting101.net/content/presentations-on-digital-storytelling/
This post is on my DigitalWriting101.net help site, which features resources to help students and faculty compose in digital media. Feel free to share the site with students and colleagues!
2. Preface
What follows is a very brief version of my COLTT presentation
on digital storytelling, which I created to deliver at a Digital
Composition Sampler presentation for PWR faculty on March
21, 2012.
Most of what I cut out of this version focuses on the process
of composing digital stories, as that’s more relevant to those
who are ready to begin composing their own. I also removed
the playable video clips that serve as examples of different
types of digital storytelling because they can’t be uploaded to
SlideShare.
If you’re interested in working on your own digital storytelling
project, please consider participating in the week-long
workshop I’ll be leading this summer. Contact me for more
info!
4. Overview
Define digital storytelling
Review its many uses in civic and educational contexts
Identify benefits to faculty and students
Illustrate approaches and process
6. "Digital Storytelling is the modern expression of
the ancient art of storytelling. Throughout
history, storytelling has been used to share
knowledge, wisdom, and values. Stories have
taken many forms. Stories have been adapted to
each successive medium that has emerged, from
the circle of the campfire, to the silver screen,
and now the computer screen."
(Leslie Rule 2009)
7. Stories can be...
imaginative educational
fiction, comics, TV documentaries
shows, movies
persuasive
informational call to action,
histories, political, activism
biographies
and more...
8. We like stories because...
They hold our attention
• John Medina’s Brain Rule #4: “We don’t
pay attention to boring things”
They move us
• Stories are often more engaging than
other kinds of information
9. What makes a story “digital”?
composed with multiple forms of
digital media:
photos sound effects
graphics audio narration
video music
animation text
10. What makes a story “digital”?
viewable only on digital devices
• computers, tablets, smartphones
• typically video or presentation
shareable across online social
networks
• easily distributed to friends and family
• potential for global audience
11. What makes it “digital storytelling”?
The phrase means more than the sum of
its parts
Just because it’s digital and tells a story,
that doesn’t make it “digital storytelling”
12. These are digital storytelling projects
photo essay documenting an immigrant’s
adjustment to American life
video reflection on overcoming a learning
disability
multimedia presentation on the slippery nature
of gender identity
13. These are not
CNN story on the “Sissy Boy Experiment”
20/20 segment on identity theft
History Channel show on the Roaring 20’s
14. Digital Storytelling is Grassroots
• Amateurs using consumer-end tools
• Purpose is to explore, enlighten, move, or
persuade, not to sell
• Often focuses on personal growth or social change
• Enables us to move from being consumers of
digital content to producers
16. Public Health Advocacy Groups
Sustainability
Social Services
Diversity
Community Organizations Social welfare
Business K-12 Schools
Local Governments Colleges & Universities
Museums and Libraries
22. Digital Storytelling in Education
All levels
K-12 schools
undergraduate and graduate classes
research projects
student services
Across all disciplines
Composed by students, faculty, and staff
For a variety of audiences and purposes
23. Potential Uses by Faculty
Convey course material using a wider array of
communication tools than text alone
Share research insights with broader audience
Create your own to serve as an example of the kind of
project you’d like students to develop
24. Topics for Faculty Stories
Memories of:
• Learning to read and write (and study)
• Navigating a computer for the first time
• What led you into your field of study
An event that was:
• Embarrassing but educational
• Perspective-shifting or motivating
• Particularly relevant to a concept in your
discipline
25. Potential Uses by Students
Research projects
• Historical: using archival footage
• Contemporary: using footage captured by
students or from fair use sources
Visual argument
• Persuade through multiple modalities
Critiques
• “Talk back” to pop culture through creative
remix
26. Potential Uses by Students
Service learning projects
• Raising awareness about social issues or
communities
• Encouraging action on behalf of organizations
Personal narratives relating to class topics
• Literacy narrative
Reflections on learning & engagement
• Self-reflective essay
27. Paper Supplement or Replacement?
Consider: why do we ask students to write
papers in the first place?
• what do we want students to learn?
• can that be learned through a digital
storytelling project instead of a traditional
paper?
29. Main Benefit to Students
Engagement!
Projects have real and lasting value
• continue to work on projects even beyond
semester
Real audiences and purposes
• friends, family, prospective employers
• service learning partners
30. Authenticity
Digital Storytelling allows students to
work on authentic assignments
develop their personal and academic voice
represent knowledge to a community of learners
receive situated feedback from their peers.
Due to their affective involvement with this
process and the novelty effect of the medium,
students are more engaged than in traditional
assignments.
(Oppermann and Coventry, 2011)
31. Critical Analysis
We already teach students to critically analyze the
digital media they regularly consume
But the act of composing in digital genres gives them
greater insight into the rhetorical strategies at work in
these genres
32. Writing Skills
Being asked to communicate in the “new
language” of multimedia brings students a greater
awareness of the component parts of traditional
writing.
Digital storytelling helps students develop a
stronger voice and helps students more accurately
and firmly place themselves in relationship to the
arguments of others.
(Oppermann and Coventry, 2011)
33. Writing as a Process
Makes clear the value of approaching all acts of
communication as a process
Can’t produce a rhetorically powerful digital
storytelling project the night before!
Requires planning, research, collaboration, problem-
solving, drafting, feedback, revising
34. Digital Literacy Skills
Helps students identify deficiencies in digital literacy skills
and remedy them while working on a meaningful project
Also helps deepen their appreciation for the rhetorical
power of multimodal communication
35. What about drawbacks?
Fairly Easy to Address Less Easy, but Doable
Privacy Intellectual honesty
(copyright, plagiarism)
Access to tools and
equipment Student resistance
Technology as potential Assignment design in light
distraction of articulated criteria
Availability of tech Assessment
support
37. Common Approaches
photo essay mini-documentary
audio essay short film
comic strip skit
animation remix
Xtranormal assembled with “reusable”
rather than original
Go Animate content
44. For more info…
For a longer version of this presentation, as
well as other materials on digital storytelling,
please visit:
http://digitalwriting101.net/content/tag/digital-storytelling/
Hinweis der Redaktion
Instructor with PWR since 1999; Digital Composition coordinator since 2010First tried digital storytelling several years ago, in WRTG 3020 (personal narrative, apply gender theory to experience)Student wanted to put photos in her essay; I suggested she put them in iMovie and record her story as a soundtrackShort selection from her project follows…
Class response to the student’s project was notable; much more engaged than with a written essayImpressive engagement on her part; story really evolved into something better; I was hooked! (didn’t know it was “dig story”)TECHNIQUE IMPROVEMENTS I would now recommend:Better use of the Ken Burns effect (no faces disappearing; slower; varied directions)Slow down the transitionsMore natural style of delivery
Should be here no later than 12:10
Leslie Rule, Digital storytelling association, 2009Conveying ideas or values using a narrative frameworkancient and intuitive human practicehow we make sense of the worldGrounding ideas in everyday lived experience rather than abstractionskey players are people, not ideasdesire to understand behavior and find coherence and meaning drive story forwardPAUSE a few beats after each main point
Move quickly
“Moving us” – persuasive appeal to pathos (emotion and imagination)Appeal to the “whole person”
MIGHT ALSO BE: interactive and/or collaborativeno print analogueAudibleaudiobooks not “digital stories” b/c not composed with digital media
WHY NOT? Stories published by CNN and other major news outlets are: produced by teams of professionals with expensive equipment and advanced media editing skillsdesigned to avoid potential conflicts of interest with advertisers and other stakeholdersin other words, not made by “regular people” with everyday equipment
WE’VE ALWAYS KNOWN that multimedia messages are rhetorically powerfulBut most of us lacked access to the tools to produce them as well as the means to distribute themUNTIL NOW…Basic video, audio, and image editing apps come standard on all computers (also available for free online)New web-based tools emerge regularlySocial networking sites provide publishing platforms and distribution channels
Give you an idea of how widespread it has become
BUSINESS: customer relations, improving employee life, etc.COMMUNITY: digital stories to raise awareness about social issues, like homelessness, poverty, domestic abuse, etc. (* hugely valuable to community projects)DESIGN: proposal to use digital storytelling to raise awareness about principles of Universal Design, making web texts and multimedia accessible to people with disabilities
About Patient Voice:- founded by “social entrepreneurs” to tell the “unwritten and unspoken stories of ordinary people”as a way to helphealth care professionals better understand patients and make more compassionate decisionshttp://www.patientvoices.org.uk/VISUAL EFFECTS: using panning and zooming on photos of hospital hallway (doesn’t even have to be the actual place)at moment of dramatic tension: zooming stops and image turns grayscaletransitions to photos with people gives feeling of movement and activity, without videoSTORYTELLING TECHNIQUES: establishes a moodsets the sceneintroduces a conflictphoto of field (“field of medicine”)
Site serves as a supplementto a Ken Burns documentary called The War, about WW 2Stories created by U. of Houston grad students and by individuals directly impacted by war. (Visitors invited to share stories too.)http://thewar.coe.uh.edu/
Digital storytelling project about migrant subcultures in Western AustraliaPurpose: “Provide community with insights into the experiences and stories of refugee and migrant communities”http://fairfieldstories.net/
Will be leading a week long workshop on digital storytelling this summer, open to all facultyIf the following examples spark ideas, consider attending to work on your project!
Incredibly popular in grade schools (these students will one day be ours)See esp. the International Festival of Student Media: amazing projects from students K-12 seeing what some of those kids produced really made me question the future of writing as we know it
Potential to reach more students by communicating in different modalitiesCourse Material:Demonstrate an activityIllustrate a conceptPresent content in engaging wayLots of research supports the use of storytelling to improve learning - people most often remember what they learned in association with a story
Topics for your own story: as example for studentsGood idea to try making your own before you ask students to do it, to see what’s involvedWill talk more about approaches and process in a bit
MY STUDENTS: Gender literacyDigital literacy narrativeLiteracy narratives are a common assignment in English, writing, language arts, etc.Digital Archive of Literacy Narrativeshttp://daln.osu.edu/
HUGELY popular among a variety of civic engagement groups, including sustainability, diversity, civic engagement, and more…“Concept in 60 seconds”Narrative version of a “public service announcement”
Sometimes the answer is noSustained inquiry or argument across multiple pages has educational valuePerhaps we should reserve paper assignments for the kinds of learning they’re best suited tomight reduce paper burnout (and grading burnout!)
After studying the use of digital storytelling in college classes over a period of five years, Matthias Oppermann and Michael Coventry found that: (read quote)Digital Storytelling Multimedia Archivehttps://commons.georgetown.edu/projects/digitalstories/https://commons.georgetown.edu/projects/digitalstories/social-pedagogy/
We teach students to critically analyze the multimedia messages they viewBut asking them to compose these messages leads to a much deeper understanding of their rhetorical functionhow the elements of digital media messages work together to persuade, using appeals to logic, evidence, and emotionhow producers of digital media attempt to establish their credibilityEnabling students to become producers, not just consumers
They also found that: (read quote)EXAMPLE of “awareness of component parts”:article by professor whose students spent 20 minutes debating the rhetorical value of a particular transition in a video project - students often have intuitive understanding of the value of transitions in video projects - when we point out what they’re doing with the video, students then say they finally “get” the point of using transitions in essayshttps://commons.georgetown.edu/projects/digitalstories/multimedia-distinctive/2/6/
MY EXPERIENCE“writing as a process” is hard to teach, esp. the value of drafting, getting feedback, and revisingneed for process becomes very clear with these kinds of projectsBTW: the process of developing a digital story also involves a lot of good old fashioned paragraph-based writing
But many don’t realize it, as they’ve been told they’re “digital natives”We owe it to students to help them develop writing skills of the future, not the writing skills of the pastToday, 3rd and 4th graders are producing mini-documentaries on civil rights leaders and famous authorsWhat kind of research projects will they expect to do in college?What kind of projects will employers expect all college graduates to be capable of producing?What is the future of writing?Don’t have research to back me up on this, only my own experienceBut I work closely with students on digital projects, and they often confess how little they know -every semester, I have at least one student who didn’t know she could copy text from one app and paste it into another one - most have never done anything more than check Facebook, do email, and look up a few things on GoogleRegardless of the digital skills they may have learned in high school, by the time they get to my class, as juniors and seniors, - they’ve been thoroughly conditioned to the demands of old school print literacyMultimodal: a combination text, images, and sound designed to have emotional and intellectual impactStudents know that multiple modes convey meaning, not just textJohn Medina’s Rule #10: “Vision trumps all other senses.”Ira Glass might say hearing is a close secondDigital storytelling projects validate a multimodal approach to communicationAge of print: printed text is easiest to produce and distribute (multimedia is for pros only)Digital age: relatively easy and inexpensive to produce and distribute text, audio, images, and video
PRIVACY: keep private or password protected; use identity obscuring effectsACCESS: all tools are now available pre-installed on computers or for free on webDISTRACTION: it is already; at least now we’re asking them to make something meaningful with itTECH SUPPORT: you’re the expert in the content and learning goals, not the software. know who to call!PLAGIARISM: you do have to go over copyright and fair use issues, esp. for projects that will be posted onlineRESISTANCE: Students may grumble at first, but you’ll be surprised by what they come up withASSESSMENT: figure out what skills you want to reinforce through a DS project before you assign it and make that clear to students throughout
All of these approaches can be taken with the free software that comes on most computers or that’s free onlineMacs have the iLife suite; Windows have MovieMakerCan also use PowerPoint, Prezi, animation apps, and lots of other toolsSee: 50 ways to tell a story (using free Web 2.0 tools)http://50ways.wikispaces.com