What is digital storytelling?

In the context of the NERCOMP event reported here, "digital storytelling" refers to the use of new media to create "3-5 minute videos that tell personal stories." Digital stories are very often the product of an intensive, three-day Digital Storytelling Workshop, a creative technique developed, practiced, and promoted by the Center for Digital Storytelling. The speakers at the NERCOMP event referred often to Joe Lambert, founding director of the Center, whose sense of mission palpably, if indirectly, informs each of the projects described at the SIG.

From its inception, the digital storytelling movement has been about "cultural democracy and community arts activism" (from the CDS's account of its own history). The participants at Digital Storytelling Workshops are often unfamiliar with tools for creating digital multimedia objects. The process of creating digital stories is meant not only to record personal memories, but also to initiate the storytellers into digital culture or to increase their media fluencies. At its best, digital storytelling encourages critical self-reflection. The emphasis is as much on educating and building community as it is on conveying the content of individual lives.

Themes addressed in the SIG

The notion that education liberates runs deep in the digital storytelling movement. Small wonder then that liberal arts educators take such an interest in the project. Anyone planning to use digital storytelling, however, faces a number of non-trivial challenges, some logistical, some pedagogical, some bureaucratic:

• How does one run/structure a workshop?
• Who are good candidates for participation?
  
• What tools should participants use?
• How, if at all, will the stories be published?
• What about copyrighted content?
• How might digital storytelling be incorporated into a syllabus?
• Can digital stories be 'scholarly?"

All of these questions surfaced to varying degrees over the course of the SIG.

 

Session I: Intergenerational Collaboration Through Digital Storytelling

Speaker: Bill Shewbridge

Bill Shewbridge described for attendees a program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) that pairs students with senior citizen residents of the Charlestown Retirement Community to create digital stories by the seniors, some of which are then broadcast by Retirement Living TV (RTLV). Inspiration for a project that aims to create broadcast-quality stories comes in part from projects like Capture Wales and Current TV. The UMBC inflection of the storytelling paradigm has the additional advantages of facilitating participation for an older population while also forging meaningful contacts between students and seniors, the university and the community. As a way to formalize the opportunity for reflection, student participants have also documented the process in a digital story of their own.

Not every institution can count on the fortuitous circumstance of being able to collaborate with a television network. On the other hand, the UMBC case does suggest that partnerships of this kind can be mutually beneficial. As it happens, the UMBC/RLTV project is planning to broaden its geographical coverage in the near future to Berkeley, Denver, and Boston, and interested parties in the Boston area were invited to make themselves known.

One implication of increased emphasis on content, as pointed out by a member of the NERCOMP audience, is that the creators might need to give thought to questions of archival standards, metadata, etc.

Bill Shewbridge's PowerPoint Slide Deck
Digital Storytelling at UMBC
Link to the Charlestown stories on iTunes

Session II: Digital Storytelling: What Are Your Options?

Speakers: Alicia Russell, Seth J. Merriam, and Laurie Poklop

Alicia Russell, Seth J. Merriam and Laurie Poklop, all from Northeastern University, tackled a number of the logistical challenges of incorporating digital storytelling into an academic curriculum. Broadly speaking, Northeastern is exploring a number of ways in which students can use digital stories to reflect on their own education. At Northeastern's EdTech Center itself, as a case in point, student technicians "write and produce a digital story about their 'Northeastern Experience' during their six-month tenure" with the Center. (Details here.) Other candidates for the storytelling treatment include study trips abroad, capstone courses, geology field trips, and more. An assignment to document one's own education naturally encourages the typically (though by no means necessarily) reflective tone of digital stories.

As digital storytelling gains in popularity, universities need to be ready to support increasing numbers of practitioners with widely varying technological experience. Discouraged by low attendance at workshops, Northeastern is turning to a combination of online support and targeted, personalized, and practically-oriented help sessions. Northeastern's online information about digital storytelling includes suggestions for educational uses, sample stories, and practical tips. The site devotes a page to each phase of the storytelling process and includes a detailed tool matrix organized primarily according to the level of experience each tool presumes. (For a comprehensive account of the process, the presenters referred attendees to Joe Lambert's definitive Digital Storytelling Cookbook.) Seth rounded out the session by showing us some of the surprisingly simple tools in action.

Although they were not addressed at the NERCOMP event, the educational uses mentioned on Northeastern's main digital storytelling page offer a partial answer to a question that came up in one form or another at various times during the event: How can we move from digital storytelling to scholarly storytelling?

Digital Storytelling at Northeastern

Session III: A Community of Storytellers

Speakers: Gayle Barton and Trevor Murphy

Gayle Barton from Williams emphasized the power of digital storytelling to build a more personal community within an academic institution. The storytelling genre often foregrounds an individual's humanity in a way that can threaten the storyteller's public face, a point we experienced first hand when Gayle invited us to outline stories of our own. But part of the power of digital storytelling may lie precisely in the way it takes participants out of their comfort zone.

Williams has been offering digital storytelling workshops since 2002. Workshops focused initially on faculty, with the idea that exposing the faculty was ultimately the surest way to build support for storytelling as part of the curriculum. Participating faculty continue to come from a range of disciplines and some of the past participants have used the digital storytelling workshop as a stepping stone to professional multimedia projects, including documentary films.

More recently, Williams has expanded the opportunity to participate in a workshop to summer students who then go on to collaborate with faculty on multimedia projects. Trevor Murphy described to us how digital storytelling is proving to be not only a good introduction to multimedia technologies, but also to broader project management skills. Whereas Williams outsources the faculty workshops, Trevor has been running the student workshops increasingly independently.

Digital storytelling at Williams

Session IV: Digital Storytelling: What (and How) Are They Learning?

Speaker: Gail Matthews-DeNatale

Gail Matthews-DeNatale of Simmons College wrapped up the day with an exploration of the learner and instructor experiences of digital storytelling. She asserts that digital storytelling is a "different mode of learning," and by interviewing digital storytellers she seeks to uncover and exploit the medium's pedagogical potential. In particular, by inviting students and faculty to reflect on the differences between writing and digital storytelling, Gail turns attention on creative process itself.

Gail then draws on insights from her informants to improve instructional design. Digital storytelling can both document and constitute an intensely memorable experience. As if playing a game of "three-dimensional tic-tac-toe," digital storytellers must forge meaning across images, sounds, and time. The process invites critical (self-)reflection in a way that writing prose alone does not always do. To bring that point home, the speaker invited attendees to work on storyboards for the story outlines we had begun in the previous session. Thinking about how the visual and linguistic channels will intersect exposes some of what is going on 'behind the scenes' in both arenas.

Perhaps partly as a result of the critical reflection that the speaker is encouraging, digital storytelling at Simmons is pushing the boundaries of the genre in a number of directions. Recent assignments have sent students out into "the field" to gather images on their stories that are then mashed up with digital maps. Readers will find numerous ideas and examples in Gail's Digital Storytelling Handbook, a must-read resource for anyone planning to implement digital storytelling in an educational setting. The Handbook includes numerous references to online examples of digital storytelling projects. The reader will also find tips on how to incorporate storytelling assignments into a syllabus, rubrics for assessing digital stories, and links to music and images.

.pdf of Gail Matthews-DeNatale's slides

In Summary

One of the stated purposes of this NERCOMP event was to convey to the uninitiated something of the power of digital storytelling to educate and liberate. As someone who has never personally participated in a workshop, I can attest that the presenters, by their collective efforts, achieved their goal. As the tools for creating and distributing digital stories become more widespread and easier to use, and as scholars become more familiar with both the technology and the genre, we can expect this maturing medium to find favor among both instructors and students. Digital storytelling has shown its worth as a means of building community, empowering individuals, preserving memory, and developing media fluencies. In academic contexts it has the potential to become an increasingly important form of scholarly communication.

Speaker Details

(from NERCOMP's event information)

Alicia Russell

Alicia Russell is the founding director of Northeastern University's Educational Technology Center and its web development branch, The Center for Innovative Course Design. Her principal interests center on using technology as a catalyst for educational change. Her research focuses on the exploration of how technology can be used to improve education on the course, program, college and institutional levels.

Bill Shewbridge

Bill Shewbridge has served as manager of University of Maryland, Baltimore County's New Media Studio since its inception in 2001. His recent work includes the development of several "Digital Storytelling" projects involving residents at Charlestown Retirement Community. He sits on the advisory board of the New Media Consortium's Horizon Report, which looks at new and emerging technologies over the next one to five years. Bill holds a Doctor of Communications Design (D.C.D.) from the University of Baltimore and has more than twenty years of experience at UMBC providing educational media support and expertise.

Gail Matthews-DeNatale

Gail Matthews-DeNatale is Associate Director of Academic Technology at Simmons College, where she has worked for five years. She has fifteen years of experience developing, implementing, and assessing online educational projects. Previously, she served on the education faculty of George Mason University, was Projects Manager for Northeastern University's EdTech Center, and Learning and Technology Specialist at TERC (a Cambridge-based science education non-profit organization). Gail holds a Ph.D. in Folklore from Indiana University, which helps explain her fascination with digital storytelling.

Gayle Barton

Gayle Barton is Director of Instructional Technology at Williams College. The Instructional Technology group includes the faculty support liaisons, media services, computer labs and digital media studios, and the development of instructional support projects. She has been at Williams for seven years, following 20 years in academic computing, administrative computing, or teaching on other campuses.

Trevor Murphy

Trevor Murphy is an Instructional Technology Specialist at Williams College. He has been at Williams for 6 years. Before his time at Williams, he served in the US Peace Corps in the country of Jordan and taught high school science in North Carolina through Teach for America. He has most recently used digital story telling as an orientation tool for summer student interns working on faculty projects.

Event Information

Date: Monday, September 24, 2007
Location: College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA USA
Workshop Organizer/Host: Gail Matthews-DeNatale of Simmons College