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.