In our last meeting we talked about Digital Storytelling, and we invited Professor Kate McDowell to take the lead in our discussions. We ended up talking about a number of issues, including:

• Definitions of digital storytelling:
  • What counts as digital storytelling? What does not?
  • How broad a definition of digital storytelling is possible? E.g., Youtube videos, discussion board posts, radio broadcasts, etc.?
  • What are meaningful possible boundaries for such a definition?
  • What do the people who call their work “digital storytelling” do? What do they consider to be “digital storytelling”?
• Digital storytelling as folklore:
  • Digital storytelling that is folklore; digital storytelling that is not folklore.
  • Patterns of dynamism and conservatism (Toelken) in digital storytelling.
• Examples of digital storytelling, especially digital artifacts specifically referred to by their creators as being digital storytelling
• A description of various dimentions of digital vs. traditional storytelling developed by Professor McDowell.
• Different conceptions of how to approach thinking about digital storytelling:
  • We noticed that there seemed to be some miscommunication going on between those of us who were used to thinking about digital storytelling from a design perspective, and those of us who were used to thinking about digital storytelling from a research or practice perspective.

Below I have included our original invitation, for those interested in our original plan.

Next week Thursday (4/10/2008) we will be holding an Eclectic Design
Research Group (EDRG) meeting from 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm in the ISRL (LIS
room 340) on Digital Storytelling. Kate McDowell will be leading the
session, and you are all invited to attend. We can skype in people who
are interested in joining the discussion but are unable to be on
campus (it works ok). Our agenda is as follows:

Kate will present:
–How LEEP storytelling classes are currently taught, including
technology and performance philosophy
–The relative strengths of traditional and digital storytelling, and
how they can be complementary

Then we will be discussing the following stories/sites/topics/articles:

Definitions of Digital Storytelling:

–Center for Digital Storytelling
http://www.storycenter.org/,
especially their highlighted example story:
http://www.storycenter.org/momquicktime.html

–Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling
http://www.coe.uh.edu/digitalstorytelling/default.htm
especially their highlighted example story:
http://www.wmich.edu/pt3/ds/look.html

(with Matt Beth)
–Methods of digital storytelling communication (via LEEP):

e.g., real-time screen captures to distribute (or some other mechanism)

Research Papers:

McDowell, Kate. Distance and Presence: A Case Study of Performance
in Two Online Storytelling Courses. Forthcoming in Storytelling,
Self, Society, Sept 2008
* Please email me to obtain a copy of this document if you think you
might be able to attend - it is not for public consumption but can be
shared for the purposes of our discussion.

Kelleher, C. and R. Pausch. Lessons Learned from Designing a
Programming System to Support Middle School Girls Creating Animated
Stories. 2006 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric
Computing. [ieee pdf], linked from
http://www.alice.org/kelleher/storytelling/papers.html

Alison Druin’s Kidpad:
— http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/kiddesign/kidpad.shtml
— “KidPad: a design collaboration between children, technologists,
and educators”
—- http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=258866&dl=ACM&coll=GUIDE

Brian Bailey’s Clover
— http://orchid.cs.uiuc.edu/projects/clover/index.html
— “Clover: Connecting technology and character education using
personally-constructed animated vignettes”
—- http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1221400

— “Designing storytelling technologies to encouraging collaboration
between young children”
—- http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=332502&coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=58138146&CFTOKEN=33036891

We look forward to seeing you there!

Our proposal, Mapping the Design Space of Design Education in iSchools, was accepted as a Wildcard Session at the iConference, the (nearly) annual iSchools conference. Wildcards are supposed to be an opportunity to try something new in a conference setting, which is an opportunity we are trying to take full advantage of.

To this end, we have set up some electronic infrastructure to support our planning activities, and hopefully to keep persistent the conversation we hope to begin during the conference. Currently, this infrastructure includes:

• Design Edcuation Wiki
• Design Ed Google Group

Please check it out, sign up for accounts, and feel free to add content and/or send messages. As we update the site, we will occasionally post here with news.

In general, what we are trying to accomplish is to have a brainstorming session where we apply techniques which we have found useful for the other kinds of design activities we engage in, and apply them to the topic of Design Education. We hope that by doing this we will both be able to identify the accent with iSchools bring to design endeavors, as well as ideas for how to teach design more effectively (or at all) in iSchools.