NMC Campus Observer

Teacher’s Buzz Discussion on Digital Storytelling

CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) : Feb 21, 2007 08:28am

This past Monday, we had a comfortable size group show up for the NMC Campus Teacher’s Buzz…. we had 18 present, a bit more managable than when 65 showed up for the previous session! This time around, we had a continued discussion on the ways to integrate digital storytelling in second life (the folow-up to the session on Feb 5 with Gudand Hao)

You can find a transcript of this past session available on the NMC Campus wiki.

We owe a big thanks to Troy McLuhan for volunteering to help lead a discussion, or as he shared it:

This all started when the NMC Teachers Buzz session visited Otis College on EduIsland back in early January… To quote from that session, “SueMaeLA Escape: the Digital Storytelling class is the one most interested so far in SL”. Later in the tour, someone asked if anyone had ideas for future Buzz Sessions… So I said. “CDB, I’d love to have a buzz session about usind SL for digital storytelling. So it’s all my fault!

Troy started by asking us to think about SL in relation to novels, TV shows, live plays, movies, the Enchanted Tiki Room, story circles, and YouTube serials, for example. A few others shared the relationship to teaching, such as Cait “I teach history. The best history is always stories. This is the problem with textbooks.”. Lyr Lobo added, “I tell ‘Fireside chats’ in my online classes… to illustrate points that students where students do not have a context. I used to ‘tell’ the story, but now, I weave the intro and draw them into the story. if learners participate, learning retention increases, involvement increases…and it becomes their story, not our story.”

Discussion flowed through the ideas on telling stories in Second Life and then into creating stories. Questions emerged asking if all people have an innate ability to tell stories or not– as Kim suggested, “Most people are passive media consumers - story consumers, rather than story tellers?”

Boris tossed out the possibility of, “You can work on the ‘I found a camera in the woods’ model, and exchange images.. a story used a series of what ’supposedly’ were images found in an abandoned camera. The images looked innocent enough - until you looked more closely, and then a rather disturbing story began to emerge. See http://tinyurl.com/2ez7m9“

And Bee, all the way from Brazil, offered another example, “There is a website in Spanish which promotes story telling… students submit paragraphs and you vote for different continuations. (http://escribeme.org/).

Troy tried to provoke more discussion by showing a 3D object which built a sine wave, and asked us to consider if there was a story within that. He sais, “SL enables all kinds of animations… which can be used to tell stories.”

In Kenzo showed up and shared some more ideas on stories:

We are making major television, commercials, music videos and also film work here in the studio integrating SL with traditional media and also looking at how to integrate it with our live action series. So far we’ve done many experiments but we haven’t settled on one storytelling format for SL.

One unique offering of SL is the ability to make difficult topics more approachable and palatable like our mixed reality video on Darfur with the avatars talking about the genocide. Kids can watch it and get it in a way that news cannot…

The key is how you mix it. I’m eager to see more creatives do that experimental mixing to see what’s most effective with different audiences. i’d love to see more surreal, out of this world theatrics not possible on a real stage– See my examples at inkenzo.blip.tv and inkenzo.vox.com.

This was a great discussion, but there seems to be need for quite a bit more ideas and experimentation in the notion of weaving storytelling, learning, and Second Life. Troy closed by giving us a “homework assignment”:

Your homework assignment is to develop new storytelling methods that are unique to virtual worlds

Story filed under: Teacher's Buzz

See all stories by CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine)