Coming About

For the past two weeks, I’ve had the special experience of being involved in a Digital Storytelling Workshop sponsored by the Center for Teaching Excellence at VCU. Nine faculty members have committed five Friday afternoons to learning the art and craft of storytelling using digital media.  I first became intrigued by this possibility after attending a conference session at the Educause Learning Initiative on digital storytelling last January led by librarians from Ohio State. They showed us how, using still images, a very compelling story can be told using just 300 or 400 words and a host of freely available images (from Flickr and other sources) and music.  From the start, I’ve envisioned this as an alternative strategy for the traditional end-of-semester reflective essay or integrative learning paper.  What better way to reflect on the learning during an entire course or program by synthesizing the experience into a few powerful images and sounds?  So, I’m in this workshop to learn the “ins and outs” of doing it so I can then help our students learn how to create their own stories that reflect on their learning experiences.

Our facilitator is modeling this process very convincingly by reflecting our on Friday sessions with a newly created digital story of his own each week to capture the learning that occurred and his own sense of meaning-making about it.  Here’s Bud Deihl’s reflection for our session last Friday in which we held a “story circle” for each faculty member to give voice to a tentative idea to a story for the workshop.  It was a wonderful two hours of sharing about our practices as teachers, full of insights into the personal experiences of faculty as they recounted learning about learning.  There will be more to share on this topic as I continue to develop my own story to share.

 Video Credits: Story Circle by Bud Deihl, 1LifelongLearner