I love teaching digital storytelling workshops to classes at Vassar. The students seem to enjoy it and the faculty are pretty happy with the results. Departments include French, Japanese, Psychology, Education and Anthropology. I was reviewing students’ examples in preparation for the upcoming LACOL panel and I was blown away by all the amazing and diverse work done by the students.
Here’s a quick summary of the kinds of digital storytelling projects that I have helped classes with over the years:
French – Digital Storybooks for FREN 206 with Mark Andrews, Tom Parker and Susan Hiner.
Japanese – Digital Storybooks for 200- and 300-level courses with Peipei Qiu and Hiromi Dollase.
Psychology – End-of-term research presentations with Mark Cleaveland’s students
Education – Semester-long collaborations with Adolescent Literacy students and their middle school partners (workshops every week)
Anthropology – A variety of uses, including digital ethnographies and engaged research
We use Final Cut Pro X at Vassar for these classes. FCP X is a powerful and easy-to-use editor. It is available in the Library’s Electronic Classroom and Digital Media Zone. Students with Macs can get a 30-day free trial license.
The goals vary by classes. Sometimes the professor wants a rich medium to tell a story. In Mark’s class, he wanted polished presentations that acted as crucibles to bring together all their research. For
Lessons Learned:
- Provide lots of support
- Don’t assume the students know how to do things
- Sound is more important than video
- Things improve with iteration
- Set clear expectations
- More faculty / instructional technologist collaboration is better
- It is helpful if the faculty member can model or provide examples
- Allow time for things to go wrong
- Try to keep track of where you put things
- Measure success by faculty “happiness” level
This is an example of a digital ethnography.
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This was produced for community engaged research:
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This is an example from a final group project for a Psychology class.
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French 206
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Japanese stories (behind Moodle login Moodle)
