My digital story concerns a predicted credit crisis in higher education by multi-millionaire, Peter Theil (founder of PayPal). Many educators dismiss the notion based on Theil’s background – what would an entrepreneur know about education.
There are reasons for educators to listen to Theil and discuss the related consequences of a higher education bubble. Education does not exist in a silo. As much as I wish social change in areas like health and education was independent from economics – it is not. The current model of escalating tuition costs in the United Kingdom, USA, and Canada is not sustainable, and this concerns all of us working in higher education.
I chose to create my digital story using a tool called Storify. The reason I did so is because Storify is a tool that easily allows the writer to weave in content from the community from other sites and social media. I believe this is an important skill for students to learn – to curate content from social trends and relate it to their own story or beliefs.
I wanted to tell a story about how a possible credit crisis in higher education as explained by subject experts and community writers would affect me personally. Because I wanted to create something that was community authored, Storify was the correct tool for this task.
I did of course find some weaknesses when using Storify as a digital storytelling tool. First, it should be noted, that it is a curation tool. The original content is text based that weaves together an array of multimedia. Some may feel this alternate way of thinking about a story told my many, in a similar way to Voicethread, as a diversion from the typical format of a sole author. If a teacher is interested in their students creating their own video edited story, they should explore other options such as JayCut. I believe this is less of a weakness and more of a medium/purpose question.
One area I found difficult with Storify was searching relevant tweets – this could be more reflective of my lack of skill with Twitter rather than Storify. I could recall a wealth of quality tweets surrounding this issue in April and May but was unable to find the content I was looking for using the search functions within Storify and as a result I did not include any.
Please have a look at my digital story here and let me know what you think of this issue addressed or how you think you might be able to use Storify in the classroom.
