This week, the Nashman Faculty Weekly Check-in meeting featured guest speaker Ben Horn, an Instructional Technologist from the CREATE Digital Studio, of GW's Libraries and Academic Innovation. Ben provided an overview of the applications available to GW faculty and students in Adobe Creative Cloud. These applications make it easy to create digital media content like digital stories and videos. Given this overview, I thought I'd share some of the resources available on using digital storytelling for service-learning/community engaged scholarship reflection assignments.
Digital storytelling can take on many forms including blogs, podcasts, image slideshows, and digital movies. By taking advantage of the opportunities that digital media provides, students are able to synthesize key aspects of their experiences, make meaning of them, and share that meaning with others to stir further consideration on important community issues.
WHY DIGITAL STORYTELLING AND COMMUNITY ENGAGED SCHOLARSHIP?
Digital Storytelling allows students to capture and share their experiences in a rich and meaningful way. It requires students to reflect on their experiences, analyze them in the context of their academic learning, and communicate this learning with others.
Digital stories have the additional benefit of being easily shared with others. We believe that scholarly work implies dissemination of what has been learned, and are happy to facilitate that sharing through our website and the Symposium on Community Engaged Scholarship event each semester.
RESOURCES
- Center for Digital Storytelling
- Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling: https://digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu
- Electronic Portfolios and Digital Storytelling
The IUPUI Center for Service and Learning outlines considerations for the appropriate fit of digital storytelling in one’s course, as well as several examples of their use in courses, providing assignment instructions, rubrics, reflection prompts, and examples of student work.
