DH: Digital Storytelling and the Five Resources Model
This week’s activities and readings have helped me to better understand the challenges and possibilities of digital humanities projects in my ENG110 course design. In “A Personal Cyberinfrastructure,” W. Campbell names my greatest hurdle to date: using the digital platform to give my course a “digital facelift.” The term “digital facelift” encompasses the frame of mind from which I have been working, due in large part to my online teaching experience. When teaching online and hybrid courses, I was applying the “digital facelift” by digitizing student interactions (discussion boards) and course material (audio-visual sources in addition to text-based sources) but not allowing opportunities for students to create or experiment with digital tools or concepts. In ENG110, I understood the aim of ePortfolio to be assigning each student a digital space, or “a domain of one’s own,” as Jim Groom describes in an interview with Anya Kamenetz (“Reclaiming Open Learning” from http://ds106.us/). But ePortfolio is not quite that space since Groom meant an actual domain rather than a college-associated space that might be deleted once the student graduated or transferred. Another important distinction separates the ePortfolio from the domain concept in my courses in that its role is that of a repository for student work and reflection rather than a space for experimentation, creation, and engagement. I think this is where the concept of digital storytelling could be explored in my sections of ENG110.
For a few years, I have been thinking about the effects of technology on storytelling — not just the ways in which the medium presents the story, but the structure and telling of a written story. In exploring this relationship between the technological medium and the project that is created with it, W. Campbell quotes Marshall McLuhan: “The ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.” McLuhan’s idea that the medium is altering the human affairs brought to my mind an example of a change in the pattern of delivery of traditional story telling. Author Jennifer Egan experiments with changing the form of her fiction in a chapter of her 2008 novel A Visit from the Goon Squad. “Great Rock and Roll Pauses,” (a chapter set in the 2020s) is a teenager’s diary in the format of PowerPoint slides that include visual representations of character thought and development of conflict in the story (http://jenniferegan.com/). On her website, Egan includes the PowerPoint presentation of the story, set to the music that is referenced in the story (each song selection having “great rock and roll pause” that one character charts and interprets). In 2012, Egan (like some other contemporary authors) also experimented with digital storytelling in her short story “Black Box,” which was released as a series of Tweets and then compiled by The New Yorker. But, ENG110 curriculum does not lend itself to traditional written story-telling, although I have made a move in that direction by incorporating a variation of the ENG122 literacy narrative. So, it seems that will be the best fit for me with a digital humanities project that adds value to students’ writing by allowing them to go beyond the traditional form of a written story and into a digital representation.
In the assignment bank of DS106, I see some possible projects to create a digital representation that will allow for students to use digital tools to share their literacy history and build their digital skills. I am envisioning these activities as pre-writing activities for the literacy narrative. In the category writing assignments, “Emotional Lyrics” is a possibility. “Emotional Lyrics” requires students to choose three songs that make them feel a certain emotion, name the song, and explain their choices. My variation would be that I would ask students to select three memorable children’s stories from their early reader years. I’d like to add a visual component (book covers? an illustration or picture from their childhood? a picture of themselves as a 5 year-old?) and then explain the emotion that they associate with each story. Next, students would create a timeline of 4 or 5 important moments in their literacy perhaps following the timeline assignment to include important world events. In the past, I have had students sketch a timeline of their most memorable reading and writing experiences. Maybe we would begin a draft in class and then digitize it. The last part of the series would be to post a GIF or picture that captures either a positive or negative moment in their literacy history with a short description of the reason or a simple caption. These activities would allow for more creative pre-writing and building digital skills such as those outlined in “The 5 Resources Model of Critical Digital Literacy.” Although they are not in-depth enough to meet some of the 5 resource categories, they will allow for developing skills in “creating” (in the “Using” category) and “expressing” (in the “Making Meaning” category) as well as the more basic skills of “Decoding.”
DS106 Links
“Emotional Lyrics” http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/emotional-lyrics/
“Timeline” http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/timeline/
Sample timeline posted in DS106: http://www.kbarbeelibrary.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Character-timeline.jpg
Reaction: http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/ds106-reacts/
Gif resource: https://giphy.com/
