Digital Storytelling: INTE 5340 – An Overview

Learning with Digital Stories: INTE 5340 – An Overview

This course reviews the uses of digital storytelling for learning. Develop and publish a short digital story that tells something important about you and your interests. Explore ways that creating or using digital stories can aid learning and personal growth.

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” – Mark Twain

Welcome! Stories have been a big part the human experience since the dawn of time. I really hadn’t considered their impact in the many facets of our world or how they have stayed the text of time, right there along with us through the good and the bad. They’re with us through the stories we remember told by the best storytellers, the salesman who connects with you when you are searching for a product, and they tend to be with the teachers that you remember most, in the things that resonate and stick in yhour world. This page of my site focuses specifically on Digital Storytelling and my experiences in CU Denver’s Digital Storytelling course, INTE 5340. It serves as the resting place for the things I want to remember from the class, as well as my thoughts and creations throughout the semester. It’s a place for me to share, explore, and stretch the meanings and boundaries of stories, life, learning lessons, and new technology. Join me on my journey!

“The cave you seek to enter holds the treasure you seek.” – Joseph Cambell

Digital Storytelling gave us the opportunity to explore the power in storytelling, storytelling format, individual and group work, as well as completing reflections on learning, two projects, and course challenges utilizing online tools to, spoiler alert, tell a story! A list of challenges was provided, we chose which ones we wanted to complete and the tools we would use to complete them. I chose tools that were new to me for each challenge, after all if it’s going to be “A Challenge” why not go for it?!

What is Storytelling? Why Storytelling?

Storytelling & Course Reference Material

What is the context?

The Cinderella formula

The Hero’s Journey

Radio Commercial for: A Hero’s Journey

John Sealy Brown on Motivating Learners

Inquiry Based Learning

Changing Educational Paradigms with Sir Ken Robinson

Everything is a Remix

Dues ex Machina

“All ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources. We are constantly littering our literature with disconnected sentences borrowed from books at some unremembered time and now imagined to be our own.” — Mark Twain

Exploring Storytelling & Games in Education

There are instructors out there disrupting education. Michael Wesh is a good example. We were asked to explore two of his productions and write a short reflection for the class Bulletin. What did we pick, and what are our take-aways on his use of aesthetic learning experiences? How does he leverage creative-culture and digital storytelling for teaching and learning?

I’ve provided links to some of Michaels productions below, you’ll want to check them out to glean a bit of insight into the power of stories and big picture use of stories in learning.

Athropology 101

To Live in This World

Marshmallow Wars

Building the Troost Wall

Reflections:

#1: Heros Journey

Questing: Digital Ethnographies or Branching Scenarios

We were asked to choose either Ethnographies or Branching Scenarios to focus on for a small group project. Knowing the power of Branching Scenarios for engagement in online learning I decided to go that route. I think there’s a significant shift in mindset when in education when we asking educators to let go of the reins a bit and give learners an opportunity to make choices in conjunction with their own learning path. In my proposal for this project I pointed to Cathy Moore’s “Is it ever okay to be a control freak?”. I was interested in what other’s thought about branching scenario’s, personalized learning and this path in general when it comes to education and learner engagement.

Requirements for the group dialogue included:

Partner-up with 1-2 classmates; record and share a discussion about a branching-scenario or digital-ethnography case study.
Organizing ourselves on the Canvas forum and posting our final dialogue.
Meet online to discuss and record your takeaways. Answer the questions below.
Produce a 20 – 30 minute digital dialogue – audio or video. Post a link or media file of the final dialogue in this discussion board.
Each Dialogue will need a host to coordinate scheduling, recording and posting of the final product.
Zoom, SoundCloud, or Synth are good tools for capturing dialogs.

Questions:

Introduce yourself – who are you and which quest did you do?
Which story impressed you the most? Why?
Which story platform impressed you the most? Why?
How do you imagine these kinds of examples might be used with a group of participants co-constructing a story together?

Quest Complete

Team: Daryl Boyd, Mary Heather Walker, & Shawna Stushnoff

Course Challenges & Projects

Challenges

“Stories create community, enable us to see through the eyes of other people, and open us to the claims of others.” – Peter Forbes

Challenge #1: Radio Commercial

The quest for challenge #1 was to write a 30-60 second radio commercial using voice, music, and sound effects while integrating a concept from the course and making it educational as well as entertaining.

I chose to focus on online teaching, more specifically online piano lessons. Sound like a stretch? Well, I’ve been doing it for about four years now with students participating the Royal Conservatory of Music exams. The youngest student has moved from level three to level five, learning online. RCM is a highly demanding program, it requires focus and attention to more than just playing. Students are required to take theory exams at certain levels, and each year they learn between 4-6 pieces from various genres of music to showcase their mastery of various types of music. Interested in learning more? Check out the RCM program here.

Learn more about the Radio Commercial Challenge and listen to my challenge submission here

Challenge #2:

Challenge #3:

Challenge #4:

Challenge #5:

Course Projects

There were two class projects – one was completed together as a class and the other was ours alone. The group project was guided by the instructor with a focus on brainstorming to complete projects in teams. The individual project was our story to tell. Flexibility and choice was key however preparation was in conjunction with the instructor to ensure we hit the target goals for the course and project.

Group Project: Story-World

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” — Kurt Vonnegut

We were tasked with outlining a fictional world or scenario where the audience is invited to imagine, play, and learn. We mapped out our fictional scenario, drafted a proposal, then created it. The parameters given were:

It should not be bound to specific times or locations.
It should focus on digital storytelling and learning.
It should be engaging and educational.

My Proposal:

In our case it was a future world

My Team: Team Gryffendor – As team Gryffendor we had a lot to live up to, I mean really! If you know the story of Harry Potter you know we had to be on our A game. But I think this team of Wendee D., Delrae H., and I, we nailed it!

“There is no real ending It’s just the place where you stop the story.” – Frank Herbert

You Challenge #1: Peter & the Wolf

Shawna Stushnoff: Design a lightweight story-game using Metaverse and multiple forms of media. The game should both tell a story – and require the user to contribute their own media to the story. Share the QR code to launch your game, so we can play.

I chose to bring AR & VR into the users home through the use of Sergei Prokofiev’s symphonic fairy taile for childen, Peter and the Wolf. This story game tells the story of Peter as he encounters various animal characters. Each character represents an instrument and the user can learn to recognize the sound of a few instruments as they play the story game.

Get the details on Peter & the Wolf here

You Challenge #2: Honeycrisp’s Heritage

Shawna Stushnoff: This is your story to tell. You pick the topic, the platform, the genre, and the tone. It can be a family story, a project for work, a fun story – all your choice. Your story must use multiple forms of media. The primary media of your story must be on a platform that you haven’t used already for this course, e.g. if you’ve done a Timeline already, don’t do one here. Do something new.

I decided to design what I will call an ethnographic, branching scenario, game in ARIS. Those two weeks were a whirlwind. There is so much to learn in ARIS and not a wealth of great material to pull you through, but I have found that determination and perseverance are often my best friends and this was no exception.

More on the Honeycrisp’s Heritage game here

Course wrap up from Brad….

Alright hero, you’ve done it. You’ve come full circle in this story-course. You’ve found some side-kicks to help you along the way and you’ve discovered a variety of new ideas, tools, and possibilities relative to digital teaching and learning. You’ve overcome a variety of challenges including a boss-challenge aka the final-project. You did it!

This is finals week and is the Dues Ex Machina for most of your CU courses and possibly for classes you are teaching i.e. a storytelling device that conveniently wraps up a story. A convenient conclusion. I like to use the term here because courses end and inevitably must have a capstone thing – a Dues Ex Machina symbolic effort to wrap things up. And while courses end, if we’ve done our job correctly – the learning continues.

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. ” – Alvin Toffler