Notes from a Session on Digital Storytelling at CCCC 2007
Posted by hickstro on March 28, 2007
Last week, I was able to attend CCCC in NYC and saw one session on digital storytelling. I thought that Trauman made some very interesting points about what digital stories allow in terms of both genre and self-disclosure. Particularly interesting to me was the point that Trauman made about sites like MySpace being simply “voyeuristic viewing” as compared to the “performative interaction” that digital storytelling demands from its viewers.
Thus, I began to think more about genre in digital storytelling and what counts as a digital story. For instance, the Center for Digital Storytelling claims in their definition that “our primary concern is encouraging thoughtful and emotionally direct writing.” Is that all? Is that too much? I am not sure. But, it does make me wonder about texts — called digital stories — that are essentially book reports, a science project, or other type of traditional school assignment souped up with multimedia. Trauman reminds us that these stories must engage the audience in compelling experiences, not just inform or entertain them.
At any rate, some notes from the session…
Ryan Trauman, Univesity of Louisville – “My Digital Me: The Digital Story as Emerging Genre”
- Definition of Digital Storytelling from Center for Digital Storytelling
- Evocative music, personal images, short snippets of video, and a voice over connecting the materials
- Points about digital storytelling
- We enact identities by sharing our own media
- Favorite pictures, songs, books, and other aspects of expressing identity
- Digital stories allow multiple media to work simultaneously
- Facebook and MySpace allow for some forms of media, but can’t be multimodal in the way a digital story can
- The process is collaborative and recursive in its multimodality
- This sphere of research is becoming more and more prominent in the field
- Investigating the affordances of multmodality for composition, focusing on form and content
- Collaboration enhances student learning
- Bahktin’s Dialogism in identity construction
- Developing a sense of self comes from others and the language available to us, focusing on collaborative and technological processes
- We enact identities by sharing our own media
- What needs to be studied
- The raw, digital nature of the process — the process and skill sets needed
- How younger students bring these processes into their own production process
- The nature of digital storytelling itself needs to be studied and looked at from these lenses
- Mixing Media
- Photographs
- Music
- Video
- Voice Overs
- How do all of these work individually and together to create new rhetorical situations?
- Voyeuristic Viewing (MySpace and Facebook) as compared to Performative Interaction (digital storytelling)
- The genre is effective because of the narrative and simultaneous nature of the work
- Pedagogy of digital storytelling as it relates to composition
- Challenged to compress materials, find appropriate media, collaborate and revise, and produce a final text
March 29th, 2007 at 4:35 am
Thanks, Troy.
This is very helpful to think about. Glad we had a spy in the room.
You wrote this:
What needs to be studied
* The raw, digital nature of the process — the process and skill sets needed
* How younger students bring these processes into their own production process
* The nature of digital storytelling itself needs to be studied and looked at from these lenses
These are the things that interest me.
Peace,
Kevin
March 29th, 2007 at 6:00 am
Interesting Troy,
In a conversation I had at my training, I got the feeling that it’s time at CDS to expand the conversation. I think they are concerned about their limitations.
The pieces are created and then what? Is it one piece and that’s the end of the project? What do they take with them beyond the DVD and what will they do with this process in the future?
Thanks for sharing this.
Bonnie
March 29th, 2007 at 7:23 am
Hi Kevin,
Right, I think that these are interesting, too. The one thing that I think is holding up a massive study of digital storytelling is trying to isolate the variables in such a way that we can “prove” its effectiveness as compared to other methods.
In The Director in the Classroom, Nikos Theodosakis cites a study where students learning about a time period in social studies created digital stories while their peers did not. While the tests scores of the two groups were the same at the end of the unit, the DS group outperformed their peers in remembering the information a year later.
So, there is something to be said for the outcomes.
Now, we need to think about the recursive nature of the process and how that is changing writing, too.
Troy
March 29th, 2007 at 7:26 am
Hi Bonnie,
I think that you make a good point about audience. I was talking with someone the other day and we were discussing how sharing writing, including digital stories, is no longer about publication but instead is about distribution.
On this blog, we are using YouTube and GoogleVideo. Are there other means to distribute DS files that make sense? A DS vidcast channel, perhaps?
Troy