Week 2 Digital Story Critique: I Am From

My theme this summer is about Change and Transitions.  I am very interested in using a poem called, "Where I'm From" by George Ella Lyon as a part of my dissertation project.  It has been widely applied in the world of digital storytelling and used as an inspiration for many others.  This is one of many examples available.  I particularly like the use of this poem as inspiration as it does address who we are in relationship to our past histories and how those fit into the larger story of our identities and purpose.  In other words, they are about the transitions we experience as a part of becoming who we are.

I used three criteria in order to critique this particular digital story.  First I looked at the media grammar.  This element includes many different elements.  I was disappointed that such a personal story did not include the voice of the author.  I believe that by simply using the poem as captions to the photographs, some of the personal voice was lost.  I would have loved to have heard the author's inflection and emotion in this piece as I believe it would have added a level of empathy on the part of the viewer.  The photographs were excellent--in particular the photograph of the hands was exceptional. That one persuaded me to want more from this.  I wanted to know more about these people, this family, their history. I did not particularly care for the music.  It did not seem to be the best fit for this story.  It's springy rhythm did not really speak to ideas like patriotism or spirituality--some of the deeper themes of the story which were undoubtedly important and even essential.  I would have chosen differently.

So, while I was not particularly impressed with the use of media grammar in this story, the story was told with great economy.  The photos were chosen carefully and were perfect illustrations to her own I am from poem.  The pacing was very good--each slide was just long enough.  The viewer had time to read just as the slide advanced.  I feel like I know this person to an extent.  I don't know how well I know her--because without a human voice, the production feels stilted and a bit distant.

My fundamental issue with the overall production is the lack of transitions.  The slides simply switch. The music starts and ends abruptly.  It is jarring--much like reading a student's writing when there are no transitions employed.  I would have loved to have seen this storyteller experiment with transitions to see if the story was enhanced through the use of them.

Overall, I would call this a great start at digital storytelling.  The foundation is solid but I'd like to see some elements enhanced and added to really create something powerful for this storyteller.

Week Two Daily Create #1: The Highest of Highs and Lowest of Lows

This week, for an audio Daily Create, I chose to create an audio which reponded to this question "What does this song mean to me?"  As I looked at several of the posted responses, it occurred to me that most respondents were choosing music with lyrics.  I am an avid classical music listener and actually, aside from the occasional choral piece, tend to listen to chamber and symphonic music rather than more contemporary music.  For this reason I chose Edward Elgar's Nimrod Variation which is one of my favorites.




Isn't it glorious? At the same time, it evokes something so deeply sorrowful. This is a unique characteristic of music. In the same piece it can bring you to tears and great joy. Sometimes I experience those emotions simultaneously in the same piece of music.

For my daily create, I used a very simple technique.  I opened the Nimrod Variation from YouTube.  I played it at a very low volume on one screen.  Then, I opened Soundcloud and simply recorded my impressions directly to Soundcloud.  This gave the whole recording the impression that I may actually have been responding to an interview question or in a spontaneous rather than rehearsed way. I think it gives the recording an impromptu and informal quality which I actually like--in spite of the fact that I tend to fill space with an 'um.'  It seems more authentic than a scripted response.

My end product sounds like this:

Week One Reflection: The Community Converges

As I complete Week One of ILT5340, one particular theme continues to emerge through the reading and participation in the various activities embedded throughout the course.  This is the idea of community.  While I have been steeped in research about digital storytelling and my own practice in this area has intuitively led me in this direction, the idea of situating learning and understanding within a community continues to repeat itself and I continue to be fascinated by how this happens and what creates the culture in which it happens with such fluidity in cyberspace.  When I first dabbled on the internet, it was 1993 or 1994.  I had young children at home and a newly found AOL account--very expensive dial-up.  I joined AOL specifically because it had a very active homeschool forum which was connecting homeschooling mothers together.  I quickly found a group and we started sharing information and learning about each other.  Twenty years later, I still enjoy close relationships with members of that group even though most of us are well past homeschooling our children who are now grown and have children of their own.  I quickly became literate in new technology which I now cannot imagine living without.  Though most of the people in this course will never know the unique sound of a modem connecting through a phone line and the expense of paying by the minute for a dial up internet connection!  

C.S. Lewis wrote, "We read to know that we are not alone."  While reading is one piece of literacy, the key to his observation is the relational element of reading another's writing and responding to it in an interpersonal or intrapersonal way.  As the authors of Chapter 1 state, "Hence, there is no reading or writing in any meaningful sense of each term outside social practices" (p. 2).  We don't create an experience which is fundamentally social in isolation.  Instead, we create shared experience-or an experience which we hope will be shared.  While I am still attempting to understand Gee's definitions of discourses, which I am finding a little convoluted, it seems to me that the essential understanding of literacy is to be able to use multiple levels of many different types of literacy and to identify "literacies as social practices is necessarily to see them as involving socially recognized ways of doing things" (p.4).  This implies more than reading, comprehending, and writing--the traditional definitions of literacy.  It  implies an application which includes interacting and understanding relational activities. 

As a secondary piece of research this week, I explored a chapter authored by Alan Davis and Daniel Weinshenker, “Digital Storytelling and Authoring Identiy.”  One of the themes of this particular chapter, in fact the stated purpose is to explore “how the processes of authoring these stories and their distribution to audiences become a resource in the authoring of identity and changing the relationship of author and audience” (p. 1).  The interesting elements of the Davis & Weinshenker explore are specifically around memory, creating identity and understanding ourselves through our own narratives and through the understanding of others.  Essentially, we solidify our identities when we tell our stories.  In my current research this extends not only to identify formation, but identity re-formation as when we work with students to understand themselves in different ways, we may be able to help them re-frame their stories  in more positives ways.  For example a student who has created a negative identify and who believes that he is a “loser” may be able to reframe that narrative and create an identity which allows him to understand that the situation of his earlier experiences make him a ‘survivor’ or even a “thriver” with the re-telling of the story. 

The work this week has allowed me to dig a little more deeply into ideas of identity, belonging, community and how digital narratives can contribute to those far beyond more simplistic ideas of literacy.  For example, how literate are we if we can read, comprehend and express ourselves but have no ability to relate to what we read, comprehend or write to the discourse around us?  Again, I am still grappling with this idea of discourse and working my way through a better understanding of that—but it seems that this work is so highly relationship oriented and situated in a social context that literacy simply must be understood in an expanded dimension given the multiplicity of ways it is expressed across many mediums. 

References

Davis, A., & Weinshenker, D. (n.d.). Digital Storytelling and Authoring Identity. Constructing the Self in a Digital World, 47-74. doi:10.1017/cbo9781139027656.005

Lankshear, C. (2007). Sampling the "new" in New Literacies. In M. Knoebel (Ed.), A New Literacies Sampler (pp. 1-24). New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Week One: Daily Create 1616 (Or Messing with Haiku DoubleSpeak!)

This was pretty entertaining and a lot harder than it looks at first. I liked the idea of playing with a poem form that required a certain number of syllables like haiku and then I found this particular haiku which pokes a little fun at the form itself. Finally, I recorded it using my sound recorder in Windows 8. Believe it or not, it took a few tries before I got it to where I liked it.

As far as the technical specs go, I used the haiku image and put in in a single PowerPoint slide.  Then I used a PowerPoint add-in called Office Mix which allows you to actually record and present your slides to create the audio recording I ended up using.  I also tried importing the Windows 8 sound recording as well--but this one just had a better sound quality.  Voila'  Double Speak!

Week 1 Reading Reflection: New Literacies

I read this chapter through a different lens than many of my colleagues in ILT5340 I think. For the past six months I have marinated in a stew of how digital storytelling fundamentally has changed the way we are exploring relationships one to another and how they can contribute deeply to our ability to understand and use empathy to create powerful change in human behavior.  This has tied together a number of different disciplines including psychology, sociology, education, literacy and story telling. It has been a wild and crazy ride to understand how this all fits together.

Brene Brown comes close to explaining it in this short video:



 So as I read this week's required reading, it really occurred to me that new literacy really is not so much different from old literacy in that it is about connecting. Humankind has been sharing stories since they congregated in caves and told tales of the day's hunt while illustrating these events on the walls of caves. I can only imagine the scene--but I am certain it created community and had a purpose.  It built relationships and must to some extent have established a type of pecking order among those in attendance.  The digitization of the process may not have changed much of that at all other than to allow us to create something digitally which may fill a fundamental need to situate ourselves within a larger community.

This leaves me wondering about the idea of a new literacy versus thinking about it as not so much a new literacy but a new modality for an ancient literacy.  This is yet another area for me to explore as we move forward in the coming weeks.

Week 1 Critique: I just hugged the man who murdered my son

This short narrative spoke to me in so many ways.  I am working on a dissertation topic which involves exploring emotional intelligence and how telling and sharing narratives can create empathy. As I listened to this particular dual narrative, I am struck by the degree of empathy that is shared by the story tellers.  It is a dual narrative because we hear it from the point of view of the murderer and the mother, the perpetrator and the victim, the forgiven and the forgiver.  It is powerful material.

And yet, it is so brief.  In the short couple of minutes, this story conveys so much shared history--and tells of both the worst of humanity and the best. This is where I think that digital storytelling can be so very powerful and really why I have decided to research it on a deeper level for my dissertation.

So as I look at the rubric this story is told simply.  I believe to tell it in any other way might cause it to lose some impact.  The story itself is simple--profound and powerful.

I go back to my theme for the summer.  And I consider how this story embodies the ideas of change, transitions and risk taking and I believe that this story embodies that theme for both of the tellers.  I cannot imagine losing my son to a murder.  Even as I listen to this mother, I cannot imagine forgiving his murderer much less living next door to him.  That is a risk I can only wonder at.

Equally so, how does a murderer forgive himself and cleanse himself from the shame of taking a human life?  I don't know how that happens either.  Yet, to listen to this story, I realize that the change, transition and risk-taking that I have experienced pales in the comparison of the depth of these two stories woven together into one which tells the bigger story of empathy and forgiveness in the worst of human circumstances.

Transitions, Change and Risk-Taking (aka Week One Daily Create!)

So, I start a new journey --or continue a journey that I started a few years ago.  In any case, this seems like a perfect opportunity to blog for a few weeks on the topic of Transitions, Change and Risk-Taking.  This is my theme this summer.  I am in the midst of so many of life's transitions.  I have a child who just became a parent for the first time--which means I am privileged to be a grandmother and learning how to do that. I am also transitioning from a parent to a grandparent which is a whole new journey which means not always needing to worry but also to sit back and simply take in the joy of knowing that my own son is becoming a great dad in his own right.

I have another child who will be married in September.  She and her fiance' just put an offer in on a house.  Life is strange when you watch your children grow up and it seems like yesterday when you were reminding them to hold onto your hand when you were in the parking lot. Where has life gone and when did those days turn into years?

And, in the midst of all of this, I am writing my dissertation.  So, I arrived to the whole doctoral program a little later than many.  However, I arrived with drive and curiosity and the thrill of the risk taking.  I'm excited!  I am excited about my research topic.  I am excited to explore something new for me.  I am excited to see where this will all take me.

Then there is the undeniable wonder of the stability of being married for nearly 31 years to a most amazing person. And yet, every day of that has been a transition of sorts as we move through the ambiguity of a marriage relationship together. It's great to have a place of stability in the midst of a world which shifts beneath our feet nearly every day.

Life is so good that it was not hard to find something for my daily create during week 1.

I have to figure out how to embed videos--So I will keep working on that.  This week, I decided to play with WeVideo which is a tool some of my colleagues have been using but which I never really had the time to explore.  I actually found it pretty intuitive for this Daily Create.  Basically, my daily create was to explore three things that made me happy. Finding those photographs was easy and even putting the short baby video was fairly simple.  I want to keep on exploring editing features.  While I managed to get captions included, I did not manage to get a voice over on the WeMovie track.

WeVideo really is a step by step process:

1. Choose a topic.
2. Upload images or video which is a drag and drop process.  It doesn't get any easier than that.
3. Drag and drop them into the order that seems logical.
4. Add music.  I chose from the royalty free music embedded in the WeVideo Editor
5. Choose a theme from the options in WeVideo.  This helps create the snazzy opening and the transitions between images.

It is super simple and pretty entertaining!

Stay tuned.  This is a summer of new things, transitions, change and risk-taking and I'll be using this space to explore that.  Onward and Upward!