Digital Storytelling

This article tries to prove the capabilities of educating students through computer technology. To do this, Sheng Kuan Chung examines an experiment where students were assigned to create a digital story from beginning to end using software available to them on their computers.

Sheng Kuan Chung creating this article in the hopes of exploring the capabilities of computer technology in educating students through creating media with a narrative. In order to prove this, the author highlights an experiment, or rather an assignment given to a group of art students at the University of Houston. In looking at this assignment, Chung tries to prove that storytelling is a power tool in teaching, promoting traits such as “multiliteracy and, aesthetic sensitivity and critical faculty.”

Chung defines storytelling as “a narrative account of an incident, person, event, or position.” The importance they not to stories in human culture is that they are able to “explain, interpret and assess situations, experiences, and ideologies, leading in turn to creation of new meanings”. Storytelling is a core part of human communication and is a practice that predates written word. In this context, Chung defines the meaning of digital storytelling as “the practice of incorporating digital text, imagery, video, and audio into the presentation of a computer-mediated, multimedia story.” The author highlights sources that see digital storytelling as not only a helpful too, but a “revolution,” as the medium allows many individuals to produce their own stories with their own meanings. A good example of this would be the site Youtube, which is talked about in the other reading.

The rest of the article goes in depth on the university course explained earlier. The project was given to a graduate-level class and focused on the idea of digital storytelling. The learning goals were as listed: first, to experience digital storytelling as being a tool for various aspects; secondly, to participate in class discussion and talk out inquiries of the digital medium in relation to education; and lastly, go work through the process of producing their own digital films, and in doing this, participate in evaluating each others’ work. The intent for the films made were to be used as presentations to teach students of varying age groups about an “event, theory, approach, style, person, or practice related to art/art education as was listed in the article.

After giving this basis of the assignment, the article goes into more depth about each particular step of the assignment. The students started by viewing digital stories created by students and others as an exercise of analysis. The students were told to brainstorm their topics, coming up with something related to art or art education. From there on the students were told to conduct research and complete a script through a set of guided questions. Next the students were introduced to the process of storyboarding. Chung goes on to explain storyboarding in relation to making sketches, but as in animation, storyboards are aware the of inclusion of music and diegetic audio and dialogue in each scene as well as camera movements and transitions. After completion of the storyboards, the students went into the production phase, creating movies using software available on their Windows and Apple computers.