Learner Digital Stories in a Web
2.0 Age
Tim O’Reilly coined the term Web 2.0, describes it as a collaborative environment where users have the opportunity to contribute to growing collective knowledge, assist in the development of web-based tools, and participate in online communities
DIGITAL STORYTELLING
Learners use personal artifacts and a variety of multimedia tools to narrate their story, describing and sharing with others significant life events in an innovative way (Porter, 2005)
VoiceThread
A digital form of storytelling emerged about a
decade ago from the Center of Digital Storytelling (Lambert, 2002)
Centers on collaborative conversations around digital images, documents, videos, or any combination of the three
Users can leave comments in various ways: voice, using their computer’s microphone or a phone; a movie from a webcam; text; and a doodling tool
Developed by Papell and Muth, and launched
in 2007
It can be made private or public
Its affordances include providing students with opportunities for peer and instructor feedback at a granular level, opportunities to receive comments from a global audience, and control over the ‘‘learning conversation’’ to ensure that it is open to the appropriate audience
EFFECTIVENESS OF DIGITAL STORIES IN
EDUCATIONAL SETTINGS
The multimodal nature of this genre helps reduce the cognitive overload in working memory. Learners receive information through both verbal and visual systems, which allows them to have more coding time (Mayer & Moreno, 2002)
Digital storytelling acts as a motivator to sustain student engagement throughout the project (Burn & Reed, 1999)
The process of developing a digital story supports student learning and higher order thinking (Nelson, 2006)
Students’ motivation to write increases when they know that their product will be published on the Internet (Karchmer, 2001)
The process of creating a digital story itself raises student awareness of audience, purpose, and form (Garrety, 2008)
Web 2.0 digital stories class project
objectives of this project
Encourage collaborative learning by asking questions, expressing opinions, narrating a story, and writing for a real audience, which creates opportunities for authentic feedback
Increase students’ electronic skills using an online application that combines a variety of multimedia such as text, still images, audio, and video
Develop a digital story element
Raise awareness of copyright
Engage learners with multiliteracies, and allow them to express themselves with different media by creating online digital stories
4 weeks
48 students worked on a multiliteracy project as part of their Advanced Academic Writing class at a large U.S. research university
undergraduate Chinese and Korean nonnative speakers of English with an age range of 18–21
The organization of their story stressed the cause-effect relationship by sequencing material properly and making use of appropriate cause-effect transitional devices
Web 2.0 digital stories provide a place for learners to share and discuss their experiences and culture. They also provide an opportunity for classmates to ask questions, learn about each other, and discuss different points of view