Digital Story Telling - Week One

The latest MEIT course through Cardinal Stritch University is titled, 'Digital Story Telling'. I have to confess that I am full of stories that I want to share - and The Internet would seem to be a good place to share them. The week started with readings from Bernajean Porter's 'DigiTales: The Art of Telling Digital Stories'. Porter introduces to us the importance of storytelling and its significant role in learning. Porter gets into what makes a good story and a lot of it hinges on the story teller having content and making a connection with the audience.



Garr Reynolds' 'Presentation Zen' takes a minimalist approach to presentations. Less is indeed more. But what does this have to do with telling stories? Have you ever read a Tom Clancy novel where he devotes a paragraph to the politics of a person holding a door open - and then never brings-up that person again in the text? Not to pick-on Clancy, but didn't those details clutter-up the flow of the story? What purpose did they serve? As a reader I find that I start skimming Clancy's work looking for the real story.

Reynolds devotes time explaining how PowerPoint and other slideware shifted presentation emphasis from content to format. PowerPoint permits one to use a multitude of colors and create endless text and bullet slides to the detriment of the intended audience. There is a tendency to use way too many colors, graphics and text that wind-up detracting from the very content we want to present.

John Sweller came-up with the Cognitive Load Theory and this applies to current state of slideware presentations. Sweller maintains that humans have a limited amount of 'working memory' (think computer memory). When humans are subject to a presentation where the presenter reads from the text slides in front of the audience - this becomes an adverse learning event. The audience is simultaneously bombarded with verbal and visual forms of the same information causing the working storage space to rapidly deplete. Concurrent use of both forms wastes audience bandwidth and takes resources away from processing the content.

Well, back to storytelling. I am anxious if not champing at the bit to get going creating digital stories! Class assignments had us viewing different videos of presenters and people telling their own stories. Some of the videos were riveting to watch and others plodded along. So how do I become a good digital story teller? I have to start with finding my exemplars and then gaining insights as to how they were able to generate and hold the audience's interest to the very end. I have the technological tools but I want to make sure that I design my stories first so that the focus can be on the message - not the media.