a creative moment

This discussion was initially posted for a class for faculty on online teaching techonologies. The question was “what online course management system or technology do you have experience with and advocate”.

I will leave discussions about Moodle, Sloodle, and the entire course management kit and caboodle to the experts.  I was first introduced to Moodle in our classes, and I only know what I’ve been discovered about these technologies in the past few weeks.

I do know something about Content Management Systems for web sites and am partial to Wordpress for blogging. I’ve used many, many tools for computer based training and digital presentation.  Authorware, Director,  Dreamweaver,  Adobe’s Creative Suite …

There is one tool (well, more of a genre) that makes all else pale in comparison. Digital Storytelling. Reader beware, if you have not yet delved into this topic. You are about to go off and spend countless hours on the Internet wandering through 1001 nights of joyful adventure.

Digital storytelling tells stories with multiple media, including still photos, graphics, text, animations, recorded audio, video, music … Typically the story presents a theme or a point of view and is rather short compared to film. Many are just a few minutes long. There are many, many educational uses for digital stories, such as the portrayal of an historical event, a rendition of a famous speech, science or math stories, autobiographies …

You might want to look at Aung San Suu Kyi – “Standing Up for Democracy in Burma” at http://digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu/social_studies.html .

Digital storytelling can be effective as both an instructional tool for educators and as a learning tool for students. For teachers, it’s a great way to capture attention, break the ice on a difficult topic, or add excitement to tired lessons. For students, an assignment to create a digital story might have SLOs such as research, reflection, evaluation, analysis, synthesis … really, there seems no end to the possibilities.

Naturally there are challenges, both for teachers and students, in creating digital stories. Bad storytelling techniques are magnified in digital media. Both students and teachers need access to the technologies that can capture audio, video, images, etc. Learning to use the tools: cameras, scanners, microphones, authoring software can be overwhelming. And there’s the danger of getting seduced by what you can do without questioning why you would do it. We need those learning outcomes and assessments!

But before you get too discouraged, have a look at a few wonderful links to see what you like. And as I said before, reader beware … you may find yourself having so much fun that you forget that you still need to complete your assignment. 

Resources:

• The Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling:
  http://digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu/index.html
• Links to royalty-free media.
  http://digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu/royalty.html
• The Center for Digital Storytelling
  http://www.storycenter.org/
• Photobus, Digital Storytelling
  http://www.photobus.co.uk/index.php?id=2
• A very interesting read if you have the patience (long): “tools for conviviality”, by Ivan Illich
  http://clevercycles.com/tools_for_conviviality/#conrec