Feedback on the Site

I handed out a modified feedback form to two teaching colleagues who would be interested in learning how to create digital stories and who are interested also in learning how to make them explore social issues (close enough to ‘dilemmas’). Overall the comments seem to be that our site (http://www.digitalstory.erithacus.org) is a positive artefact (although as colleagues the pressure to state positives might be large).

The first reviewer had no problem with the content but felt that the overall look and design of the web pages could be improved (considerably?). For instance:

• The home page is bland.
• Many pages have sidebar spaces but nothing in them, ‘feels like something is missing’.
• A better description of some of the web pages would be better. For instance DST in education, is ‘really short and feels almost useless’.

This reviewer ended by saying:

I thought it was really interesting and also something that to some extent could be used for primary school. All my comments have to do with the form and not with the content. I don’t have the beginning of a clue when it comes to creating websites (Technology is sadly starting to make me feel old already) but I think that a more interactive layout might help convince readers that this is the way to go. If there was a way to design the website (or at least the homepage) for the reader to actually briefly experience DST, it would be a great help.

The second reviewer had more to say about the content.

On the page that we used to demonstrate ‘two voices’ we put in a YouTube video of a poem performed by two poets telling the same story from their point of view. The reviewer stated:

As much as I loved “An origin story”, I didn’t think it was a great example of a ‘dilemma’ which is what I understand was the point of this section. It seems to be there more for the entertainment value…I get that it’s ‘two-voices’ talking about the same incident.

I think you could find a more helpful example.

Which is a fair comment. Without wanting to sound defensive, the reason we could not find a more relevant example was because we cannot find one. This is a ‘brand new’ way of using digital story telling. We had initially wanted to create our own stories to highlight this, but ran out of time.

Overall this reviewer stated:

I don’t understand the purpose of the ‘keeping it real’ section of the course. It refers to ‘these pages’…does that mean the rest of the course? I felt like I was missing something.

‘Miscellaneous’ doesn’t make me want to look it up…classdojo seems to be suited to a younger age group than secondary students (so I did look it up 😉 )

I think that the ‘storyboard’ included in your blog is great…and would be really helpful to educators implementing this process for the first time.

This is a missing page, it was supposed to have focussed on the idea of keeping the essence of the stories ‘real’ and not allowing a template format (similar to the ‘Death by Powerpoint’ bullet point template phenomena) to predominate. There were examples in the literature but it is something that needs more time and are to curate the kind of examples that we needed to demonstrate this. ‘Less haste – more speed!’

Thank you to both anonymous reviewers of our site (but I know how you are!).

The evaluation form we used:

TVDST Evaluation Project

A StoryBoard for Two Voice DST

Here is our submission for a storyboard that encapsulates how the artefact should theoretically work.

 

Designing an Artefact Back to Front

One thing that’s struck me in doing the TMA03 module, is that one can see that the tasks that were required of each group, was to try and ‘inch’ or ‘step’ our way along to creating our educational artefact in a specified Web 2.0 innovation. So we were given the innovation to consider (but we had options to design our own – fair enough); we were asked to: describe a more precise educational aim from the generic one we were given; create a team to construct it; along with elucidating our individual biases before we came to a consensus vision; consider a target audience of our educational artefact (create a persona or two); we were to describe the educational need that our artefact would fulfil; specify a potential solution and then think about design principles and/or templates; understand the educational theory that would support the artefact; and then finally  implement the design and then hopefully get feedback and also spend time reflecting on it.

In reality we already had so many of those initial steps already thought out that we found ourselves already ‘at the end process’ before we had even done the first section which was to spend time figuring out our desires for the artefact and then come a joint vision. Our joint vision was (fortunately) a shared one, and that is always easy when the whole team consists of two people.

I am not claiming the ‘step forward’ process is not valuable but it did seem as if we were doing everything backwards.

In reality though we were incorporating an approach called ‘backwards design‘ a good introduction to this can be found here.

My suspicion is that the reason that this seemed most natural to us to do, is because we are both teachers in (progressive) secondary school systems and as such recognised that we could incorporate this into our own teaching/learning activities.

Hence we already have an idea of what the teaching and learning bench marks are for our respective pupils and we already knew in principle, how Digital Story Telling could help us achieve those aims.

It’s been an interesting ride!

Digital Story Telling Case Study

A quick shift through a Google search on the effectiveness of using Digital Story Telling (DST) in education, reveals many articles that state how wonderful Digital Story Telling is, perhaps with the word ‘engagement’ coming up most often.

However, there seems to be little empirical data to show that DST either does increase engagement with the topic and/or that learning has in fact increased. Perhaps because DST is so new, but certainly there are not enough studies to warrant a meta-analysis.

One encouraging study which is presented here as a case study was conducted by researchers from two Australian universities who studied the use of DST to enhance engagement in a ‘constructivist’ learning paradigm in both primary and secondary schools. The main questions they asked were:

• How can digital storytelling be used to enhance student engagement?
• How can digital storytelling be used to improve educational outcomes?
• What are teacher perceptions about student learning through digital storytelling?

Teachers were given workshops to learn how to use DST in an educational context and how to use a particular software tool to merge both video and audio narration content (Moviemaker). Teachers were encouraged to use a variety of steps to help their students create their DSTs.

1. Brainstorm the story.
2. Create a Storyboard
3. Find appropriate material
4. Create the digital story (i.e. use Moviemaker)
5. Edit and obtain feedback.
6. Present, promote and evaluate.

In truth the results are all positive but the research design is so full of methodological holes that it’s not possible to seriously evaluate the use of DST over that of any other form of pedagogy. Having said that, the observations are of interest, because the poor research design does not preclude the idea that DST is a valuable educational pedagogical tool.

Engagement

Overall engagement was rated qualitatively (i.e. subjectively) as ‘moderate’ to ‘high’. The year 7 students apparently had low engagement when creating a storyboard (too abstract?), good engagement for year 9 students but apparently poor engagement for year 11 students who displayed a general lack of interest in the school curriculum. They did however, enjoy learning about the use of digital media. The authors agree with a statement made by other researchers that,

With the aid of the latest developments in technology, classrooms welcome digital
storytelling as a means of teaching, and students are motivated to conceive an academic concept and transmit their own (Dupain & Maguire, 2005).

However, this goes against the grain of someone like DST advocate Tolisano (2015) who feel that DST is not about the technology, but rather the content, meaning and skill set of the presentations of a story.

Most likely the presentation of digital tools provided a novel learning environment and this was of interest. The authors do make the (valuable) comment that at the very least the digital literacy skills are increased.

However, what I find is probably more realistic from this study is the feeling that the students were more collaborative than they normally are. This greater collaboration engineers the greater engagement.

I am not personally convinced by their argument that the engagement shows that learning is occurring through a ‘constructionist’ approach, even though the intuitive understanding that they ‘should’ be learning through this manner seems clear.

Also,

Also, the findings indicated that teachers believe that the use of stories in education
is very beneficial for countries receiving immigrants, such as Australia, because a digital story incorporates multiple aspects of the curriculum, and all teachers should use this medium at some stage. One teacher commented that in their school, where they work with many students from non-English-speaking countries, students welcome the opportunity to express themselves through visual media, rather than more words; it facilitates communication for new students and builds their confidence. Similar finding were reported by Benmayor who stated that digital storytelling can help learners to transfer their knowledge, skills and culture, thereby evolving their thinking process and helping them gain confidence. Accordingly, digital storytelling can be classified as an asset based pedagogy (Benmayor 2008).

suggesting that DST for migrants coming to a country like Australia, provides a valuable avenue to express themselves particularly confronting ethane-cultural issues.

In conclusion, this case study does not seem to provide solid empirical evidence that DST enhances learning, but it does offer some potential clues of how it could be of benefit in a learning environment, with particular emphasis on the opportunities for migrant students to express their acclimation (or lack of) progress in the new homeland they are studying in.

References:

Benmayor, R. (2008) Digital Storytelling as a Signature Pedagogy for the New Humanities. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 7, 188-204.

Dupain, M., Maguire, L. (2005) Digital story book projects 101: How to create and implement digital storytelling into your curriculum. Paper presented at the Proceedings of 21st Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning, 2005.

Rosenthal-Tolisano, S. (2015) Digital Storytelling: What it is… And… What it is NOT. (Online). Available at http://langwitches.org/blog/2015/08/18/digital-storytelling-what-it-is-and-what-it-is-not/ (Accessed 1st June 2016).

Smeda, N., Dakich, E. & Sharda, N. (2014) The effectiveness of digital storytelling in the classrooms: a comprehensive study. Smart Learning Environment, 1.

Having a Focus

I think the more that our group thinks about this project, the more that we’re coming to the conclusion that the focus of our site should not be about ‘creating a set of tools to create Digital stories’ because now that we’re actively looking, there are hundreds if not thousands of excellent ‘how to’ sites. Why reinvent the wheel?

So instead we’re going to really focus on the very narrow use of the digital stories being somehow a medium or avenue that brings about learning above and beyond a traditional discourse essay that involves an evaluation of social, cultural or ethical issues.

I think our real concern at the moment is that there’s no or little quantitative evaluation that digital story telling really is, that much more engaging and somehow qualitatively better than traditional essay writing.

For the moment it’s possible to not worry about that too much and just focus on the idea that it’s a medium in which to learn digital skill sets that are probably relevant to the learner of the 21st century.

The Challenge (Activity 9)

We have agreed that there is no ‘single’ challenge that the construction of our site needs to overcome. Instead we’ve listed four and none of them we can figure are more important than the other. So in no order of priority they are:

• Ensuring that we hit our ‘target user’ (teachers wanting to learn how to use Digital Story Telling) appropriately.
• Providing intelligent design so that the elements that we’re agreeing on, are intuitively found on the site.
• Curating our site so that it’s not information overload. Spend time parring down the information to get teachers up and running asap with their students – but (ideally) give them resource forks if they want/need/request it.
• Fulfilling our TMA03 requirements within the site.

We’re grateful for any guidance BUT for the moment we’ve decided to try and incorporate all four challenges in our web design.

Creating Digital Story Telling Artefacts

This is the first post for the site that describes the creation of our site that we are required to do for the H817 course that is part of the Masters in Online and Distance Education as part of the UK’s Open University.

In it we will be commenting on:

• the processes by which (pedagogical artefacts) are produced; &
• an evaluation of the quality and effectiveness of these artefacts.

We don’t want this to be part of the main site, which is really the pedagogical artefact, but we do want it to be easily accessible.