Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Digital Storytelling CEDO 530 - Week 1
The first week of this new class has at least clarified what exactly was meant by "Digital Storytelling". I kind of had an idea because I had to do some research about 2 months ago on a program called Storytelling Alice but I wasn't sure if this would be along the same lines or not. The one connection that I hadn't thought of was the presentation aspect. Digital Storytelling certainly ties into presentations and their techniques but for some reason I had the two separated in my mind. I was under the mindset that "Presentations were factual and serious" and "Storytelling was emotional and animated". I quickly realized that my way of thinking was part of the problem. Factual and serious usually equates to "boring". The expectation, especially in the business world, is that when a PPT slideshow or similar presentation flashes up during the meeting that it's time for the head-nodding to begin. I really hope to learn of some resources, techniques, and methods to use in making these normally "boring" presentations more exciting and impactful.
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It will be interesting to see some of the differences in students' reactions to "presentation" vs. "storytelling". I suppose in the same way that using an analogous story to prove a point can be more powerful, presenting a concept as a story could work just as well.
ReplyDeleteThe best presentations are stories, and for our students and ourselves, becoming effective at presenting anything is relevant to anything we do. The more exposure we have to these ideas of what storytelling is, the better we can get at it. I don't expect to be amazing my first time, but hopefully as progress will happen as I develop skills. The same goes for my students.
ReplyDeleteI'm interested in what you though about Storytelling Alice? I've looked at and played with the regular Alice a little bit but never had time to do anything with it. I've never tried the Storytelling version because it's Windows only and until now, I haven't had a Windows computer for a while.
ReplyDeleteThe program I settled on for teaching students programming is Scratch from MIT. Scratch could also be used for Digital storytelling, though I think both Scratch & Alice require the learning curve of the program itself as well as the programming to be able to produce a story whereas some other tools may make it simpler to get a story out.