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
• 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

The other day, I attended (and, to some extent, helped out with) a digital storytelling workshop at the MRA Conference. This was significant for a few reasons, and it encouraged me to think about a few aspects of planning a digital storytelling workshop for RCWP this summer as well as for MRA next year.

First, the session was led by a technology coordinator from one of Michigan’s intermediate school districts. As I was planning the technology strand for the conference, the presenter was recommended for the session by MRA’s current president (one of his colleagues). This was a smart move for MRA as the presenter was very knowledgeable about the composing tools that Movie Maker offered, and gave us a CD-ROM with many, many links and resources (as well as some printed and handed out in a folder). It was a four (yes, four!) hour session on Sunday afternoon, smack in the middle of a three day conference.

His approach was, as you would expect, technical and we didn’t talk (at first) about many of the literacy/litreary components of digital storytelling. Case in point: copyright. He was very good at sharing the overview of fair use for teachers and how, when kept within the walls of our classrooms, using certain kinds of materials from copyrighted materials can help you compose digital stories. As the session went on — and the participants in the session kept asking questions — I began to think that talking about Creative Commons would be a good idea. So, we did. And the presenter was very thankful for the new information. We were then able to move into a larger discussion about file management (which he was able to cover well) and citation of online sources (which I added to). The back and forth conversation that we had was, I felt, mutually informative for us and for the participants. Another case was how to use transitional devices between slides, and the effects the authors wanted to achieve.

A second significant point that came out for me was the fact that this event — setting up a mini-lab of laptop computers at the MRA conference — was a first for the organization, so far as anyone on the board remembers. The model worked well, as Aram and I presented our “Reading and Writing with New Media” session in the morning, using the laptops for that, and then we left them set up for the digital storytelling session in the afternoon. I think that we might pursue doing something like this for next year’s conference, too, as many of the participants in the session told us how valuable they found the hands-on time with the one-to-one support.

This encourages me on two levels. First, I think that these participants will really take the skills and attitudes that composing digital stories engenders back with them to their schools. Sure, they could have got the 50 minute overview (and there were sessions at the conference on digital storytelling that did tha), but this was an interactive session where participants left with their own story (we were frantically emailing them as time ran out). Second, I think that this is a model that we need to adopt as NWP sites — taking the technology to the places where the most motivated and interested teachers are at: local, state, and national conferences.

So, those are some thoughts on the session. Again, the presenter approached it for nearly the first hour as a technical exercise before he even showed a sample of a digital story. That said, I think that we take some of the lessons learned here and apply them to what we think the “ideal” digital storytelling workshop might look like. What do the rest of you think?

Troy

I attended an Art and Technology session March 10. The goal was to connect art with teenagers. The project had students looking at art work, creating poems, writing scripts about the art work and then creating digital stories.

See this site http://www.nelson-atkins.org/education/NewDimensions_Moving.cfm

They used DS because of the possibilities of publication, and audience. They found the students were excited about the technology, but worked harder on the project because it might be published for all the world to see. I found the say thing happening when I had students do projects that would have an expanded audience. They worked harder on projects like web pages, presentations to be shown at an open house or to the schoolboard. It something about going outside the classroom walls that idea of giving students a bigger audience. I am using my mini grant monies to do an open institute on digital storytelling and some othe Web 2.0 activities. We are going to try a podcast, use a wiki, and blog. I will be picking this groups brains a little closer to June. I have the hard copy handouts from that session. I plan to reproduce them to use for my June open institute. When I get this all put together I will post it on the PLWP web site and post a link here.

Mary in Missouri