Scholarship Responses
Alongside of our practical application of digital storytelling, we were also asked to study current scholarship and literature that discussed the practice and its pedagogical uses. I am not currently teaching, but I still appreciated exploring how educators are leveraging a variety of storytelling practices using digital tools. I really enjoyed delving deeper into these ideas and I appreciate reading about learning theory and educational psychology. Having these assignments allowed me to really engage with the material and process my own thinking about digital storytelling practices.
Reading Chapters 1 & 2 of New Literacies by Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel were instrumental in setting the groundwork for my overall understanding of literacy practices and the forms that literacy takes. I took two ideas from these chapters and made them the focus of my writings: "Skills plus community" and "Ways of being in the world". In the first case, I thought of social learning, identity and discourse. In the second case, the major themes that I synthesized had to do with social practice, the encoding of ideas and the transmission of these across multiple platforms. I am very interested in the social aspect of media. Some of the most interesting digital stories that I encountered this semester were through social media platforms. What I consider to be vitally important in digital education is the ability for work to transcend time and space, to reach individuals where they are, and to afford a mobility never before seen.
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Why Critical Design Literacy is Needed Now More Than Ever is an article written by S. Craig Watkins, a professor at the University of Texas Austin and the author of The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future. I had been reading peripherally about this author and I was really hoping to somehow incorporate his work into the discussions we were asked to have in this course, but I wasn't able to figure out exactly how to do so within the frame of digital storytelling. Instead, I took this blog post of his that I found and submitted it as a scholarship response. At first glance, the topic of "design literacy" may not appear relevant to digital storytelling. However, the premise parallels our discussion of media literacy. Watkins asserts that young people's facility with technology positions them at an ideal vantage point from which to explore design - and not just in the classroom but in their own communities. This is sort of abstract and non-specific, but what he is really saying here is that young people can easily become producers of information and not just consumers.
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The article Extending the Potential for Struggling Writers was one of my favorite pieces of scholarship that I read this semester. The authors offer so many important insights on how students self-perception as "good" or "bad" writers can really paralyze their progression as critical thinkers. The affordances of digital storytelling are vast: students can see and hear their ideas come alive in ways that just aren't possible by simply writing text. When a struggling writer finds success through multimedia application and literally finds his or her voice, imagine how powerful that is for someone who has always considered himself a "bad" writer.
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