Digital Story: multimedia narrative for meaningful learning

THE RATIONALE FOR DIGITAL STORYTELLING

Digital storytelling provides valuable learning opportunities. This is because of the power of multimedia to engage learners, the value of narrative construction for meaningful and reflective learning, and the opportunity that the production of a digital story provides for learners to develop new media literacy.

Research shows that the ‘Net generation’ prefers multimedia to text media (Sanders et al., 2009). Hence, educationalists are increasingly looking to cater to this learning preference by adopting technology for the creation and delivery of digital narratives. The educational value of digital storytelling is explained by Sanders et al. (2009, p. 156) as:

• “Making meaning from experience requires the construction of a narrative.”
• “Narrative is usually presented as a structured story in which there is an overall coherent theme rather than a random collection of media. This structuring of narrative increases reflective learning through an active and creative process in the author (Ohler 2008).”

The rise of e-portfolios in higher education has seen the emergence of digital narratives. However, there is still some tension around whether the reflection and critical thinking associated with traditional, text-based assignments is replicated in assignments that involve the use of multimedia (Sanders et al, 2009, p. 165). Educationalists are at times a step removed from the Net generation who already embrace Web 2.0 in their personal lives for remixes and hashups; a learner population referred to by Lamb (2007) as “culture mashers”.

MY VIEW

The digital story I created is intended to be a learning aid for my Moodle course, Discover: a short course in digital information literacy. It is instructional and narrative in content, and the process of creating the story has required me to reflect on how to use the Internet to conduct an information search, to “teach myself” the steps, and to reproduce the steps in a multimedia narrative that will be meaningful to viewers. I found that the construction of a digital narrative has given me a valuable, reflective learning experience.

PROCESS OF MAKING A NARRATIVE

– Define a story objective (digital story to show people how to find information on the Internet) and story content (key messages, explanation of the types of information sources, and examples of websites)
– Experiment with software options and choose a suitable software (Stupeflix)
– Produce a story, publish and test it
– Make improvements and embed the file on Topic 3 of my Moodle course.

Stupeflix was not the first software I attempted for this challenge. I first trialled webslides because of the intention of showing websites in the story, but webslides was experiencing problems and I got tired of waiting for it to become functional. I found that the combined visual and music of Stupeflix worked fine and the software was also easy to use.

DEVELOPING MEDIA LITERACY

What media literacies have I developed from this project? I discovered how to chose a theme from Stupeflix’s five theme options. I made 58 individual images in Fireworks, these being images of text graphics, screen views of websites, and screen views of websites with text graphics overlaid. I discovered how to import the images into Stupeflix to create a narrative, and the result was a visual narrative of 3:32 minutes duration. I discovered how to select a music track, and chose one with appropriate tempo and a matching duration. The export stage required me to pay a subscription – the scale of my story was beyond the scope of a free service. I paid USD29 for a one-year subscription. I discovered that my story was available for broadcast and the code was provided for me to embed the story here.

RESULT: THE DIGITAL STORY

CLOSING REFLECTION

While narratives are often developed with characters and drama to share a personal experience, I chose to create a digital narrative that is educationally instructive. It is intended to tell the story of a search for information on the internet.

REFERENCES

1. Lamb, B. (2007). Dr. Mashup: or, Why Educators Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Remix. Retrieved 4 July 2011.
2. Sanders, J., Murray, C., & McPherson, M. (2009). Chapter 9: Reflective Learning for the Net Generation. In T.T. Kidd & I. Chen (2009), Wired for Learning: An Educator’s Guide to Web 2.0. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.