Digital Story

I would like to acknowledge Natalie’s generosity in sharing her story with me, providing photos and even her MRI scans. This story is itself an illustration of the power of social media and the Internet to connect people and build awareness.

This story will become part of the “Source” module in my Source, Search, Evaluate course. The goal is to provide a personal perspective on health blogging, its value and ability to connect people, as well as encouragement on how to get started.

Reflection

Choosing a Tool

This will come as no surprise to people who know me: I like to look at all of the options available before making any decision. As a result, I spent a lot of time reviewing “The Fifty Tools” (Levine, 2007), signing up for different tools, exploring the features and limitations, and then moving on to the next. I had initially dismissed using Yodio because of its appearance. While I still think that some of the other tools provide more attractive publishing options I now see the other value of Yodio. While it’s nothing flashy, it is in fact the best approach because its focus is on audio, which is exactly what I wanted my story to do.

I’ve organized my thoughts around this by looking at the most relevant elements of Bates and Poole’s SECTIONS model (2003) for this scenario.

Students

The interface needed to make playing, pausing, and navigating the story obvious and intuitive for students. While it is embedded in an online course, the audience for this course are older adults and the purpose of the course is to increase people’s knowledge about technology and comfort with it. If the story is not easily navigable it could actually destroy people’s growing confidence or enjoyment.

Ease of Use

As Bates and Poole point out, technology in teaching should be “a means, not an end” (p. 87), and after two failed attempts using tools that proved to be unreliable in the production or publishing stages, I fully appreciated this point. Most of the tools featured user-friendly interfaces, but many lacked any user documentation or support community. I was reminded of how important this is for success with technology, even for small projects.

Teaching & Learning

The focus of Yodio is combining audio and pictures in equal parts. Many of the video and slideshow tools I tried were more focused on the visual aspect of the story, with audio as only a “background” feature. This is Natalie’s story, and I wanted it to be her words that carried it.

Storytelling highlights the personal, and for many people technology is just the opposite. Natalie’s story transforms the potentially scary world of blogging into a friendly and productive way to connect with people. Students meet a real person who has ventured into the world of health blogging, and whose blog they can then explore and read. Being told how to do something, why to do something, and how great doing that is going to make you feel is not half as compelling as hearing from a peer about their experiences. For this reason it was important to have the story be entirely in her words.  In a sense she is presenting her own case study of how effective the blog has been for her personally and also for her friends and family. Natalie is so open and likeable that she is easy to relate to, and her story will offer students a personal way to connect with the value of blogging and the process for getting started.

Many of the resources in the course will be text, so it is important to “incorporate digital tools and resources to promote student learning and creativity,” as suggested by the International Society for Technology in Education (2008) in the NETS framework. Using an audio-visual tool adds to the variety of resources and helps people with different learning preferences connect to the materials.

Interaction & Interactivity

Yodio offers limited interactivity, but the format of a story told in the protagonist’s voice offers a personal interaction with the material.

Speed

Once the source materials were collected Yodio offered a speedy production process. It has a drag-and-drop interface that was so intuitive and easy to use that it made my heart sing. It also supports quickly making changes to specific components without impacting the overall design.

Future use

Anderson notes that “the capacity to support human and machine interaction in a variety of formats (i.e., text, speech, video, and so on), in both asynchronous and synchronous modalities, creates a communications-rich learning context” (2008, p. 344). Because this tool is so easy to use and people can choose to use their phone to do the narration, I could imagine encouraging students to use this tool to tell their own health stories. There is a lot of emphasis in our organization on the value of stories and identifying ways for people to share them, and this tool can support that. It also offers the ability to publish privately (which many tools do not) so that stories can be shared only with a specific group if people are initially anxious to share their personal stories outside our volunteer network.

Notes to self

Interviewing Natalie and putting this story together have actually convinced me of the power of blogging. I had imagined how powerful it could be, but hearing Natalie’s story really helped me believe it. I have always tended not to share share things with the big wide world because of an intense desire to guard my privacy. However, seeing how Natalie uses the personal to connect and inspire has shifted my thinking about this.

On the technical side, here are a few things I’ll remember for next time:

• Test out all aspects of the process – including your ability to embed the final product in a blog page – before you get too far into the process.
• Sometimes simple works.
• Look at the support documentation. Is the support community just a list of questions nobody ever answered? (You know who you are!)

References

Anderson, T. (2008). Towards a theory of online learning.  In T. Anderson & F. Elloumi (Eds.), Theory and Practice of online Learning. Edmonton AB:  Athabasca University. Retrieved from http://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/02 Anderson_2008_Anderson_Online Learning.pdf

Bates A. W. & Poole, G. (2003). A Framework for Selecting and Using Technology. In A.W. Bates & G. Poole, Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education (pp. 75-108). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 4.

International Society for Technology in Education. (2008). National educational technology standards for teachers.  Retrieved from: http://www.iste.org/standards/nets-for-teachers/nets-for-teachers-2008.aspx

Levine, A.  (2007). The fifty tools. Retrieved from: http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/StoryTools