Digital Storytelling
Reflections on digital storytelling
My story can be found here:
http://www.vuvox.com/collage/detail/014712618a
I spent quite a lot of time last week thinking about what kind of story I wanted to tell. In the end, as you know, I wrote a memoir about our Jack Russell terrier-cross, Dexter, who died this spring. The story was written primarily for my family, especially my kids, who had never lost a pet before. Although it was meant mainly for them, due to the parameters of the assignment, all of you got to enjoy the maudlin tale was well.
As I thought about how I wanted to tell the story of Dexter’s life, I considered several options – should it be a conventional narrative, with the arc of a traditional biography? (Dexter was born on a small farm south of Peterborough, one of a litter of seven…) But I decided that an episodic approach would work better, given the materials I was working with, ie. family photos. If I had been writing a less personal story, one that I wanted to illustrate with more generic photos taken from public access websites, for example, the material may have dictated a different approach.
Once I had decided on the episodic approach, I started to brainstorm the stories. I wrote ten paragraphs, short snippets from our life with Dexter. I tried to balance the stories – different kinds and different feels. From the beginning, I also knew that I wanted to use one of my favourite tunes from my husband Andy’s last album, a song he wrote as a tribute to George Martin called The Fifth Beatle, because it had the sort of elegiac feel I was looking for in the memoir. Music can create a powerful mood and Fifth Beatle created the right mood. Once I had the basic pieces of the story ready – short stories, pictures, music – I started exploring the 50 ways website to see which of the digital storytelling tools would fit the vision I had.
My initial assumption was that I was looking for a slideshow tool, but as I reviewed the options, it became clear that adding your own music was tricky with those programs. Most of them limited you to short audio clips or an internal library of music, which didn’t fit what I was looking for. I moved on to mixer tools, which had that capability. In the end I settled on Vuvox. I checked out Mixercast but couldn’t find the free version and Voicethread seemed more appropriate for a conversational piece than a straightforward story. In addition, I needed either to be able to upload two audio files that would play simultaneously (song background plus voiceover) or have fairly substantial captions; neither of these seemed to fit well with Voicethread.
As I worked to put the story together, the tool I had chosen had a significant influence on how the project turned out; so much so that if I had unlimited time, I might have abandoned Vuvox Collage and gone with a different tool. The horizontal, right-to-left scrolling meant that the text had to be chopped down from several sentences per story to just a couple. It would definitely be easier to read if it went bottom to top like film credits. In addition, I cut the overall number of stories from 10 to 6, as I felt the presentation started to get too long. After spending a couple of hours with Vuvox Collage, I did go back to the list of tools and see if I could find something that fit what I was looking for more closely but nothing I looked at seemed to do exactly what I wanted, so I went back to Collage.
All of these tools have great potential for students in a wide variety of contexts. Students are required to do presentations in lots of different courses – social studies, literature, health, just to name a few. They are also required to write stories and essays. In any of these contexts, it would be appropriate to get students to begin to experiment with some of the different tools listed by Alan Levine. There are a number of compelling pedagogical reasons to begin to integrate these kinds of tools into the classroom. As Anderson (2008) argues in his article ‘Toward a Theory of Online Learning’, effective learning is community centred (p. 39). Without question, these types of Web 2.0 tools are at their most fundamental social in nature. They are about sharing information or stories in a conversational fashion; in other words, they are meant to be commented on. The communication is meant to be two-way, not just one way. Because they are meant to be shared by multiple people rather than just the person in the desk across the aisle from you (as would be the case if students were exchanging paper-based projects) they help create a web of interaction, rather than just linear interaction. As well, these tools encourage both interaction with the learning material and interaction with others about the learning material (Bates and Poole, 2003, p. 99).
Anderson (2008) also argues that effective learning is assessment centred (p. 38); these tools increase a teacher’s ability to add different types of assessment to the classroom by including peer assessment in the spectrum of tools used.
Working with multiple media types – audio, video, text, and so on – mean that the teacher can offer a broader based approach to learning that can appeal to different learner strengths (Bates and Poole, 2003, p. 86). Finally, creating mash-ups of these sorts requires students to sieve through large quantities of information (textual, visual, auditory) in search of the pieces they need to create their own story or presentation. This activity teaches both navigation skills and critical thinking skills and encourages a basic constructivist orientation, one that “stresses individual discovery and construction of knowledge” (Anderson, 2008, p. 42).
References
Anderson, T. (2008). Toward a Theory of Online Learning. In T. Anderson and F. Elloumi (Eds.), The theory and practice of online learning (Athabasca University Press). Retrieved July 18, 2009, from http://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/02_Anderson_2008_Anderson-Online_Learning.pdf
Bates, A.W. and Poole, G. (2003) A framework for selecting and using technology. In Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education: Foundations for Success (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass)
Levine, Alan. (2007) 50 Web 2.0 ways to tell a story. Retrieved July 8, 2009, from http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/StoryTools