Digital Stories

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Permalink Reply by Fred Mindlin on January 12, 2008 at 12:13am

Looking at the text which accompanies the photos of the winners, not much energy went into the writing part of the task, and I doubt the writing piece even factored in the judging--it's an image-driven contest. That's the unique power of digital sotrytelling in the classroom: as a story-driven process, there has to be crafting of the written piece before images are created or found.

At the same time, each image has real emotional power, and can certainly spark a lot of authentic writing. So of course it's a reciprocal process...

Permalink Reply by Jon Orech on November 18, 2008 at 11:40am

Good point, Fred. As a former English teacher, I tended to focus on good narrative writing before even mentioning anything about images. Afterwards, I would have them gather their own images to supplement. When writing, we would focus on Point and Dramatic Question as well as "showing instead of Telling" (Sensory details.)

It is amazing how the GOOD stories would burst off the screen...the ones that weren't well-written...well..fell flat.

Ironically (or maybe appropriately), the stories that were less than compelling tended to rely more heavily on "effects." In other words, the "fluff" had to cover up for the lack of substance...or what Joe Lambert calls "Digital Spectacle."

Permalink Reply by Gladstone B. Alves on November 4, 2008 at 2:52pm

The argument for downplaying the role of the tech issues in the whole discussion about social interaction design brought to my memory some words put out by Theodore Roszack back in the eighties, basically that the essence of the progress in culture and human communications didn’t coincide with the progress in information technology. Quoth the aforementioned:

“Any kind of experience — even ‘inner experience’ not induced by external stimuli — may initiate cognitive processes leading to changes in a person’s knowledge. Thus knowledge/ideas can be acquired without new information being received. Understanding an idea means knowing the peculiar sources of inspiration of those who created and championed it, their vulnerabilities, and blind spots.”

I don’t know if current social interaction tools are humane to the point we can make that journey through another mind in the light of other ideas, including some that we have fashioned from ourselves from our own experience. Roszack also stresses the complex interplay between experience, memory, and ideas, which is the basis of all thoughts. Take experience here to mean the /stream of life/ as it molds personality from moment to moment, not the empiricist equivalent of mere information entries.

“We don’t normally collect much experience of this sort. The turbulent stream passes into memory where it settles out things vividly remembered, half remembered, mixed, mingled, compounded. From this compost of rememberd events, we somehow cultivate our private garden of certainties and convictions, our rough rules-of-thumb, our likes and dislikes, our intuitions and articles of faith.”

Then human memory, the key factor here, is fluid, wavelike, drawn from private fantasies we hardly admit to ourselves, not separable labeled items subject to total recall. The ingredients of a lifetime mix and mingle to produce unanticipated flavors, and just in the right circunstance a single residue bubbles up into a well-formed insight about life, an idea/knowledge. None of this is data processing. It’s the give and take of dialogue between two minds, each drawing upon its own experience.

Permalink Reply by Jon Orech on November 18, 2008 at 11:54am

Hi Jeri,

This is a very promising idea for a phot contest. I would like to find out more about the "Commentary" you talk about.

In answer to your question, absolutely not...it is not fluff, as long as the lesson has certain structures. First, STORY must drive the project. For kids especially, sometimes these projects disintegrate into a "slide show." One of the tell-tale signs is when kids begin a narration with, "In this picture I..." A good test, is to ask the question "Could this story stand alone without the images?" If not, then perhaps some revision is in order. The second point about story is that it must be focused. (Kudos for only allowing 50 words!) This compactness nurtures three great results: Emphasis on figurative language, elimination of "excess baggage," and focusing the story onto a single event. Instead of "My Disney trip" the focus becomes how a fight with a sibling on a Disney trip resulted in a change of feelings toward that sibling.

The 2007 winners are great images, which brings up another great point: "Less is More." I love how this assingment reduces the matter to a single image...as Rod Stewart says, "Every picture tells a story."

Also, depending on the age of your kids, you could focus on basic elements of composition...line, color, contrast, form, etc.

Cool stuff!