Etale – Life in the Digital World

interdisciplinary musings on life and education in the digital world

Archive for category digital storytelling

A Manifesto on Graduate E-Learning Programs – Part 2

Jun 2

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At best, e-learning is an educational conspiracy, challenging the superiority of traditional face-to-face graduate study. E-learning often gets the scrutiny that is deserved of all learning. Is a one hour lecture to a group of 30+ students truly the most effective way to help students master the stated course objectives? Is it superior to or more effective than other methods? Or, is it simply an unquestioned higher education tradition? E-learning, in some cases serves as a challenge to such traditions. For that reason, it may well be a mechanism to not only increase accessibility to higher education, but to challenge, improve, and transform what takes place in traditional face-to-face graduate programs.

While certainly not an exhaustive list, here are five other ways that e-learning graduate programs challenge the superiority of traditional face-to-face graduate study:

1. They challenge the notion that one must move or travel large distances in order to obtain a high quality graduate education.

2. They challenge the notion that one must submit to often inflexible schedules of courses and offerings in order to obtain a quality graduate education.

3. In some cases, they challenge the notion of a one-size fits all graduate education (although many of the best face-to-face programs join in this challenge).

4. In other cases, they challenge the notion that graduate courses are best designed and taught by a single person. Instead, in the best cases, e-learning promotes a team-based approach to course design that may include a combination of subject-matter experts, instructional designers, graphic designers, computer programmers, and a variety of other specialists. In fact, the role of instructor is just one of many factors in some good e-learning course designs. What makes the role of instructor so sacred? The only essential role in effective learning is the role of learner.

5. They challenge the idea of the closed-door no questions asked approach to courses. In place of that, many online courses and programs receive ongoing careful scrutiny. Furthermore, all course activities are perfectly recorded and available for post-course review and evaluation. Imagine if every classroom interaction, every instructor comment, every student comment, and every student artifact of learning in a traditional face-to-face course were available for careful review as part of a course improvement process. That is already the case with many e-learning courses. This is not to suggest that all e-learning programs use this data, but the data is available, there is an option to use it.

Which comes first, the image or the text?

Dec 13

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When I first learned about digital storytelling, it was suggested that I begin by crafting an outline for a story, a lived experience. Sit in a quiet place and write, by hand or keyboard. Take the time to craft an outline, then a written narrative that will direct the rest of the process. It is only after you have written the story that you are able to choose the images, music and other effects that will help you accurately communicate the message. Words first, everything else is decorative. That isn’t descriptive of all digital storytellers, but it is how I initially understood digital storytelling.

image wordI certainly respect this word-first approach and I believe and hope that the written word has a long future. Beyond almost every great play and film is a great screenplay. Every talk show host has a team of writers to help him or her sound funny (the recent strike highlights this fact). And people on the six o’clock news don’t get by with tooth whitening, a contagious smile, and a likable voice. Turn off those teleprompters and see what happens.

I personally find this text first approach to be valuable, but it is not the only option. For one reason or another I became interested in photo essays this past week, so I stopped one of my colleagues, a faculty member in the art department, and asked her what she could tell me about photo essays. My vision of a photo essay was still connected to what I just wrote, writing an outline and then finding images to help tell the story- images serve the words. But she explained that many photo essays don’t even have words. It can be an image-first approach to telling a story, communicating a message, or evoking an emotion. After you have crafted the visual experience, you may or may not choose to go with subtitles.

So we have two contrasting approaches to creation. From an educational perspective, this is a promising discovery. Photo essays might be a wonderful way to help visual learners explore, communicate, and understand. It might even be a strategy for helping them learn about the written word. And those students of the word (yes, they still exist despite the various claims that 60% percent of people are visual learners), can use their love of the lexicon to gradually explore the world of visual literacy.

Web-based Digital Storytelling

Dec 8

Posted by etale in digital storytelling, sites and sources | Comments off

If you are looking for an easy web-based digital storytelling tool, check out Voicethread.

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Live Storytelling in a World With Different Rules

May 27

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I hadn’t put a great deal of thought into my last post. It was just a thought that occurred to me, something that I suspect to be an experiment that is likely to emerge in the near feature. Looking back at the post, there is an intriguing element to the idea of live performance and storytelling in virtual worlds, places where things like gravity and many laws of physics no longer inform our actions. Given these differences, how are classic stories retold in this virtual world? To what extent do they take on new and different meanings? For me, part of the joy is in experiencing something in a virtual world while knowing the same idea in the physical world. It is a joy of “getting it,” like it is an inside joke. We experience something similar when we watch a contemporary film that has an obscure historical quote or reference, just enough for you to feel clever for noticing it. So it is with traditional stories told in the virtual world. But what happens when the roots of these stories are not known to the “viewer”?

A Good Idea, but it Didn’t Pan Out.

May 11

Posted by etale in digital storytelling, hardware | Comments off

I just completed teaching a graduate course entitled “Applying Technology in the Content Area.” To my surprise, all of the students were lower elementary and preschool teachers, and much of what I had planned for the course was of limited benefit to them. However, what did capture their imagination was digital storytelling. They found the most wonderful applications for it: collages of student pictures and comments about their mothers for Mother’s Day, a day in the life of a preschool student, recaps of field trips, and much more. Given this strong interest in digital storytelling, I revised the course throughout the semester to capitalize on and feed their interests. One such evening activity involved a simulation where they divided into teams and were contracted by the University to create a virtual tour and digital story for prospective students at the University. The idea is that they would tell a story of their journey to ten magical/wonderful places around the campus. As an added touch, I added GPS units to the assignment where they had some waypoints that they had to locate and then photograph for inclusion in their tours and stories. So each group had a mission, a digital camera, and a handheld GPS.
All of that turned out well. What didn’t was a camera. Given that I work with many parochial school teachers with a limited budget for extra resources, I have been looking for low cost products for digital storytelling. At a local chain store I found a tiny $20 digital camera in the toy area. It could hold up to 20 low resolution images (just internal memory, no SD card). I thought it a wonderful experiment as a class could more easily buy five or six of these for a group of elementary school students and not worry if one broke. While I still think the idea is good, the specific product that I purchased was not ideal. Transferring images from the camera to the computer required camera-specific software that took 35 minutes to install with more than a few glitches along the way. And then the software itself was less than intuitive. To top it off, the images were very low quality, distractingly so. I suppose that the moral of the story is that you get that for which you pay :) . Perhaps there are other $20 digital cameras that are easier to use. If so, I would love to hear from you. Of course, you will need to send your ideas on the “contact” page. I had to disable comments because of spam issues.

Educational Simulations and Interative Digital Narratives

Jan 5

Posted by etale in blog, books, digital storytelling, editorials, great ideas | Comments off

Clark Quinn’s book Engaging Learning: Designing e-Learning Simulation Games has implications for so much more than e-learning. Clark, having a background in both education and game design, does an excellent job blending the vocabulary and theories of education and gaming. Along the way, he lays out eight elements that he considers important for an educational simulation.

  1. Theme – The simulation should involve a setting and context (neighborhood people working on a community garden, editors working on a newspaper, a family moving into the Old West, etc.).
  2. Goal - There should be a clear goal that can guide the student actions and it should be tied into the story (neighborhood people must choose where to plant the garden and what to plant, newspaper editors must get the articles read to publish by the evening deadline, family must gather proper supplies to survive a trip to the Old West, etc.)
  3. Challenge - If the goal is too easy or too overwhelming for your learners, then they will likely check out.
  4. Action-Domain Link – Students should be expected to make decisions (action) in the context of the story. A bad example cited by Quinn is creating a game where students have to solve a math problem and if they do, then they get to play a game. For a good simulation the game should be part of the simulation, not just a separate reward.
  5. Problem-learner Link - The problem or simulation should match the interests of the learner. You will want to keep in mind things like gender and age-level interests when creating or selecting an appropriate simulation.
  6. Active – The simulation should require the learner to take frequent actions…be given situations and then have to make frequent decisions. This keeps the learners engaged in an ongoing basis.
  7. Feedback – Related to action, a good simulation should give the leaner clear and quick feedback on decisions. This is where much of the learning takes place in simulations. As a learner makes a choice in the story/simulation, he or she should be able to see the consequences of the decision.
  8. Affect – There should be some emotion created in the simulation. Emotion is a powerful way to keep the attention of learners, and Quinn suggests that keeping things a bit unpredictable is a good way to add interest and emotion.

I look at this list and consider the implications for interactive digital narratives and more traditional digital storytelling. If nothing else, consider the principles of engagement.

As I wonder about the future of film and digital storytelling, these ideas also prompt me to consider the extent to which digital storytelling will take on an increasingly interactive element, as already evident in Second Life as well as some of digital stories being crafted as nonlinear collections of images and web pages. Consider the idea of a digital story where the viewer can manipulate parts of the visual experience, experimenting with how the changes impact the mood and message of the story. What an intriguing way to help people develop media literacy skills.

One last random thought on the subject:

I wonder how long before we will be able to watch a movie where we choose the clothing, actors, and setting. :)

Great Digital Stortelling Resource for Educators

Jan 2

Posted by etale in blog, digital storytelling, sites and sources | Comments off

Today I am reminded of the commercial about high speed Internet access. The main character in the commercial starts with a slow modem connection, but then gets high speed. He sits down at his PC, types for a few seconds, then leans back in his chair, proud and amazed, and exclaims, “I’m finished!” Sometimes I am overwhelmed by the number of resources available on the web and, at my less pleasant moments, I find myself overwhelmed by the discrepancy between what I want to know and what I actually know. I am humbled, sometimes troubled, but more than often excited when I discover something new, especially when it is something that I should have already known.

I have been reviewing digital storytelling sources on the web for quite some time, and only today did I come across the wonderfully practical and helpful Digital Kids Club on the Adobe site. This site includes explanations for how to use digital storytelling in the classroom, arguements for how it can support various content area standards, tutorials on facilitating digital storytelling with a class (granted, the instructions include use of Adobe product), tips on what makes a great digital story, advice on digital image editing, and much more. It is definitely worth thirty minutes of your time! Partially due to my oversight of this resource for so long, and equally due to my appreciation for the content, I have also added a link to this site beneath “My Favorite Sites.”