ELI Reflections: Digital Storytelling

The first session I attended was on "Academic Digital Storytelling" by a group from Ohio State University's Digital Union (http://digitalunion.osu.edu/. They are using DS as means for faculty to produce professional portfolios. Some obvious examples include slideshows of a Fine Arts faculty's work, and a narrated video of an Education faculty's research into innovative teaching practices. These pieces are creative, visually appealing, and most importantly tell a story which engages the audience and engenders a personal connection with the author. OSU conducts a 3 day intensive workshop for faculty, during which they learn how to use the necessary authoring software in addition to becoming familiarized with the elements of effective storytelling. The software they learn is the type of consumer-level authoring apps that we often train on at Digital Commons, namely Apple's iLife suite (iMovie, Garageband, etc.). It's very easy to get even a novice user (faculty or student) up to speed on these apps, and the various templates and other automation they provide make it very easy to create very professional looking media. Most of the time limitations and lack of flexibility of these packages are precisely what makes them attractive - a lot of creativity can come from being forced to work within constraints. Advanced features just cause unnecessary cognitive load, which is clearly bad when your primary objective is self expression and learning concepts other than how to operate software. OSU seems to have successfully developed a program that places emphasis on the appropriate skills. 3 days does seem to be a rather excessive duration for these workshops, and I wonder how easily we could convince Penn State faculty to take that much time. Although their attendance levels are decent, which makes me at least consider the potential of this here. 

The second session I attended was Bryan Alexander's Web 2.0 Storytelling presentation/workshop titled "Chaotic Fiction, Alternate Reality Games, and the World's Cheapest MMOG". First off, Bryan is the essence of what you want to see in every teacher - energetic, passionate, very smart but able to communicate difficult concepts very clearly. There's a lot about his approach to this session that I'd like to incorporate into our own future DS workshops. He explained the theoretical foundation of DS, much of its history, and showed many examples of how the affordances of social media platforms such as blogs, wikis, and Twitter can enable some fascinating exercises in collaborative storytelling. One example was of a short story authored entirely in a wiki by a community of people, which I believe was guided by a single master author. The end results might not have been top-notch, but I think the journey is what's of real interest here. Every plot twist and new direction was vetted by the group, and successfully adopted ideas were the jumping off point for new ideas. Some other examples included rich media (audio and video) and more or less extensive uses of group collaboration. What really brought it all together was the hands-on group storytelling exercises which Bryan wove into the presentation, which consisted of everyone getting into small groups and being presented with a wiki within which we were asked to tell a brief story about a random image assigned to our group. It's at this point that everyone really starts to understand the choice of the term "Chaotic Fiction". Bottom line, if your students are laughing while they're learning, you're doing something right, and we were definitely laughing (and learning). Just some final thoughts on Digital Storytelling: There's a time and place for it, although you might be surprised how many educational uses there are. Pick a subject and brainstorm some ideas. And think across Bloom's taxonomy - there's definitely some compelling uses along the continuum from lower-order thinking (telling a story which simply conveys basic facts) to higher-order thinking (synthesizing many ideas to tell an original story). You'll be much more successful if you use simple tools. Provide access to straightforward access to Creative Commons licensed media so authors can jazz up their productions - (http://digitalcommons.psu.edu/freemedia). Use free tools like PBWiki, Blogger, and Twitter (if you don't have in-house options) to add an element of collaboration to the process. We'll offer more storytelling workshops this semester. I will try to post follow-ups to that in this space. Thoughts?