Module 2 Project - Literature Review

Going through the resources found on the University of Houston's Digital Storytelling website turned to be a useful investment of time. The website defines Digital Storytelling as the use of computer-based tools to tell a story. The components suggested, are: images, text, recorded audio narration, video clips, and music. Bernard R. Robin (“Educational Use of Digital Storytelling”, p. 1), provides a similar definition:

combining the art of telling stories with a variety of digital  multimedia, such as images, audio, and video. Just about all digital stories bring together some mixture of digital graphics, text, recorded audio narration, video and music to present information on a specific topic.

The reviewed resources emphasized that Digital Stories are very similar to traditional stories in their focus on specific topic and containment of particular point of view. According to the Center of Digital Storytelling, California, Digital Stories are composed of 7 elements:

1.     Point of View

2.     A Dramatic Question

3.     Emotional Content

4.     The Gift of Your Voice

5.     The Power of the Sountrack

6.     Economy of Content

7.     Pacing.

The Digital Storytelling team at the University of Houston enhances the above list for the purpose of meeting educational needs as follows:

1.     The overall purpose of the story

2.     The narrator’s point of view

3.     A dramatic question or questions

4.     The choice of content

5.     Clarity of voice

6.     Pacing of the narrative

7.     Use of a meaningful audio soundtrack

8.     Quality of the images, video and other multimedia elements

9.     Economy of the story details

10.  Good grammar and language use

I found the latter list a very good instrument to devise a Marking Scheme for Assignments of this sort. It will be a very good tool to enhance the marking scheme the next time I setup a similar learning opportunity for the students. It’s too late to incorporate it in the current Assignment that I have already shared it’s outlines including the marking scheme with the students.

Dr. Jonassen et. Al provided in his paper (“How Does Technology Facilitate Learning”) many ways in which students can learn with technology rather than from it. I found that Digital Narrative do meet most of the criteria mentioned by Dr. Jonassen for technology to foster both learning and thinking. Bernard R. Robin’s, (“Educational Use of Digital Storytelling”, p. 5), validated my theory on the suitability of using Digital Narratives to foster students learning. Bernard had successfully identified the various literacy skills that the students would develop by working on Digital Narratives, to be:

1.     Research Skills: Documenting the story, finding and analyzing pertinent

information; 

2.     Writing Skills: Formulating a point of view and developing a script; 

3.     Organization Skills: Managing the scope of the project, the materials used and the time it takes to complete the task; 

4.     Technology Skills: learning to use a variety of tools, such as digital cameras, scanners, microphones and multimedia authoring software;  

5.     Presentation Skills: Deciding how to best present the story to an audience;

6.     Interview Skills: Finding sources to interview and determining questions to ask; 

7.     Interpersonal Skills: Working within a group and determining individual roles for group members; 

8.     Problem-Solving Skills: Learning to make decisions and overcome obstacles at all stages of the project, from inception to completion; and 

9.     Assessment Skills: Gaining expertise critiquing their own and others’ work.

The Digital Storytelling team at the University of Houston recommends Educational Digital Stories to range in length between 2 – 10 minutes. This is very close to the range I provided my students as a guiding reference, considering the nature of the MIS case study in hand.

A very nice sample Digital Narrative “on Digital Storytelling” was found and shared with the students as a reference too.

Implementation Plan ... A Series of Fortunate Events!

It was very nice coincident to find out that the requirement for this week is to come up with “Implementation Plan” for our projects. This is due to the fact that I have already developed, shared with the students three weeks ago, and posted in my first week blog one J

Reading Jonassen et al. text on “How Does Technology Facilitate Learning?”, was another fortunate event today. This is due to the fact that I found at least a dozen of reasons supporting the use of Digital Narratives to foster students learning J

I thought it’ll be a good exercise to do this week’s assignment in a reverse manner, by evaluating the design of my implementation plan using the concepts in Jonassen’s text.

Assignment Learning Objectives

Using Bloom’s Taxonomy, the learning objectives of this MIS assignment can be defined as follows:

•        Evaluate how enterprise systems help businesses achieve operational excellence.

•        Describe how supply chain management systems coordinate planning, production, and logistics with suppliers.

•        Explain how customers’ relationship management systems help firms achieve customer intimacy.

•        Identify the challenges posed by enterprise applications.

•        Describe how enterprise applications are used in platforms for new cross-functional services.

The Concept

The idea is very simple; the students are supposed to develop a case study in their MIS course describing the business case behind an Enterprise Application investment. They need to put their findings in a creative Digital Narrative to be shared and discussed online. I’m considering YouTube as a tool for sharing and discussion.

Proposed Pedagogical Approach

This is a very learner-centered pedagogy strategy for the many active learning opportunities that it involves the students in:

• Starting from the Independent Learning approach to better understand the nature of the three categories of Enterprise Applications as described in Chapter 9 of the course textbook.

• The full involvement of students in designing the research to understand the circumstances surrounded a real-world scenario of a real organization while investing in such system.

• Another learner-centered opportunity is the involvement of students in designing a Digital Narrative to present their findings as a creative digital story.

• And finally, students will be involved in rating other groups Digital Narratives and discussing them in a semi-controlled online discussion, following the rules outlined in the “Discussion” component of this assessed task.

How Discussed Digital Narratives Foster Learning

The proposed pedagogical approach to use Discussed Digital Narrative fosters meaningful learning because the whole assignment concept, development approach, as well as the end results requires the students to think and reason:

• Casual Thinking is required for the students to explain the connections among the: selected product capabilities, business challenges faced by the selected organization, the various changes that the organization had to administer to realize a return of their investment, the development of a sensible sequence of thoughts to produce a Digital Narrative, and finally to provide meaningful answer to various questions posted against their Digital Narratives by other groups.

• Analogical Thinking is required for the students to compare and contrast the self studied theoretical concepts from Chapter 9 with facts collected from the real organization to develop the case study of their Digital Narrative. By relating to the business case of the real organization they’ll be able to better understand the concepts delivered in the assigned reading.

• Expressive Thinking is required for the students to represent what they know about selected Enterprise Application in the context of the real-world case study. They’re also required to express their understanding in various formats, using: Digital Storytelling tools, and online discussion tools. They will also need to express their understanding of the theories self-studied from Chapter 9 while designing their research by deciding on the type of questions to ask and approaching the right people with those questions.

•  Experiential Thinking is described by Jonassen in his text to result in the most meaningful and resistant memories, which is certainly in line with the Digital Narrative component of this assessment. The students will develop a digital story of their learning experience that will deepen their understanding and help them effectively achieve the learning objectives of this experience.

• Problem Solving skills of the students are going to be exhausted throughout this exciting learning opportunity all the way till the end. According to Jonassen’s text, deciding what information to include, how to structure it, and what form it should take are all complex decision-making processes that are required to meet the requirements of this assignment.

My Expectations

Jonassen’s very convincing argument for learning to happen as a result of productive thinking and meaning making by students as they learn with technology, rather than from technology is guiding my expectations in this project. I have limited the role of technology in this assignment to set of tools that students will use to learn with not from, while representing what they know in various formats. I expect the resultant learning to be deeper and more meaningful; however, experience is the best proof!

PLN ... a network that works for you

PLN is a combination of some connection I have in the industry, family members that keeps providing me with valuable updates, colleagues that I share common interest with and bounce ideas with all the time, all the online tools that I check for updates, and last but not the least King Google! I really wonder how we could live before Google, I run to it with any question I have in mind and it always delivers the best resources that gives me what I need.


Networks are very powerful things and PLN is a more focused form of networking for a specific objective ... that is our own learning and professional development ... I mainly used LinkedIn groups and followed some experts on Twitter to get updated on various areas of interest in life ... surprisingly the only one thing that I haven't included in those streams of updates is pedagogical related ones! what a shame!


Another thank you goes to PGCTHE team for guiding us to the importance of developing a more focused approach towards using web 2.0 apps to develop a PLN that truly adds value to our professional life as educators ... I feel now that what I need is to update my Twitter and linkedIn subscriptions to include educational strategies in general and web 2.0 pedagogical strategies in specific ... I'm also planning to take the advice provided by the "Innovative Educator" blog provided through moodle ... I already started following three of the suggested Twitter expert educators.

It's quite complex to manage all this I'm afraid! I would love to get some suggestions on the best way to build a dashboard like environment mainly focused on my education related subscriptions ... The idea is to link all my information feeds, whither it's Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, or any other blogs or so to this single environment to have a one stop shop that I can visit once a day for updates!