Category: Chapter review

Weekly Reflection: Getting Farther Away From the Campfire

256px-Campfire_Pinecone(Photo by Emeldil at English Wikipedia [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)

In chapter 3 of Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community, author Joe Lambert discusses a live stage project of one of his collaborators, Dana Atchley.  In 1990, Atchley began performing a one-person show in his San Fransisco studio called Next Exit,  a guided tour of his life traveling across the United States.  Part of his performance involved a campfire, or more specifically, the image of a campfire on a video monitor.  Atchley would tell stories about meeting “offbeat Americans” and interact with video segments projected on a backdrop.   This metaphor made me think of the times I would be with fellow campers, camp councilors or friends and there would be an exchange of stories near the fire.

In recent years, however, I feel that I am getting farther and farther away from that friendly circle of warmth.  I’ve worked a variety of temporary, seasonal, and part-time jobs since getting laid off from my full-time employer in 2010.  What’s worse, that was the third layoff from a full-time job I’ve had to endure since 2003.  During this time of economic uncertainly, my relationships with work colleagues and friends have weakened.  The shame of not having a steady job makes a person withdraw.  I have two part-time jobs now, but there are semester-dependent positions through higher education institutions.  Come mid-May, I may have to find some other steady work as a source of income.  This employment instability, constant job-searching and feeling of embarrassment has kept me from coming closer to the campfire.

To a certain extent, being enrolled in graduate school has improved my self-esteem and given me a better idea of a possible career track.  The total online nature (and dramatic lack interpersonal engagement) of the Information and Learning Technologies program, however, is giving me some off-campus blues.  WordPress blogging, Twitter exchanges and Zoom meetings are useful, but there’s still a great distance between the “camper” and the “campfire”.  Plus, it seems I am not the only person in my INTE5340 class that has succumbed to disengagement.

Truly, I do want to get closer to the campfire and engage again with my friends, former coworkers and current students.  My fear is that even if I talk, will anyone really listen?  I hope so.

 

 

Chapter Critique – “A Road Traveled”

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I was intrigued by the first chapter of Joe Lambert’s book, Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community.  In chapter 3, Lambert tells his own story of how he, along with several other key contributors, founded the Center for Digital Storytelling.  His journey began in 1950s Dallas, where he grew up in, as he put it, a “small oasis of liberal friendliness in the desert of 1950s Texas conservatism” (p.26).  I was intrigued about how folk music of that era played a major role in shaping Lambert’s idea of storytelling.  He comments “digital storytelling is rooted fundamentally in the notion of democratized culture that was the hallmark of the folk music, reclaimed folk culture, and cultural activist traditions of the 1960s” (p.26).

Coincidentally, my mother has had a life-long interest in folk music since her days as a student at Iowa State University in the early 1960s.  On many a long drive to my grandparents’s house in Iowa, we would hear Peter Paul & Mary, Joan Baez and The Kingston Trio.  Although I’ve never been a huge fan of the genre, I understand why young people connect with those songs as well as with the songwriters of that time period.  Much of the folk music inspired college students during the protest movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s.  For Lambert, the folk music gave him ideas on how individuals, especially those marginalized by factors such as income, race and ethnicity, could tell their stories.  As Lambert puts it, “… the populist artist in the folk traditions sought out a way to celebrate the ordinary, the common person, and their daily battles to survive and overcome” (p.27).

In discussing the significance of folk music, Lambert brings up the idea of “citizen-centered authorship and authority” (p.27).  He further expands on the significance of this concept when discussing how, in 1993, he and his future Center for Digital Storytelling collaborators “came to understand that mixing digital photography and non-linear editing were tremendous play spaces for people” (p.32).  To me, the 20th century concept of “citizen-centered authorship” sounds very much like what we have now in the 21st century internet with WordPress blogs and YouTube videos.  These are forms of personal expression that are not subject to centralized editorial control.  As someone who went to college in the early 1990s and studied television production, our generation were just beginning to understand the possibilities of using video for storytelling purposes.  Unfortunately at that time, my educational institution, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, only had Panasonic camcorders and simple linear editing systems for us to put together our personal narratives, which were largely inspired by indie filmmakers of fiction such as Richard Linklater, Spike Lee and Quentin Tarantino.  I never thought I would drift off more towards the documentary genre later in my career.

One thing missing from this chapter was information on where Lambert went to college.  That might seem like a small omission to some, but I was curious as to what type of institution helped steer Lambert in his thinking.  He mentions coming to San Fransisco in 1976, but everything between his arrival there and his childhood in Dallas seems to be a mystery.  Personally, I found my time at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to be incredibly rewarding, despite learning with out-of-date video technology.  Overall, it was a very enlightening chapter that gave me a glimpse into the author’s journey.  I am already delving into the next chapter.

Chapter Critique – “The Work of Story”

Most of the time, change is good.  For our Learning with Digital Stories class (INTE5340), we were given the option of critiquing a different reading from the book Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community.  The author is Joe Lambert, who founded the Center For Digital Storytelling in 1994.  The organization’s website, StoryCenter, showcases a variety of digital stories that include themes such as health, family, education and social justice.  I’ve already critiqued a couple of these videos on my blog.  After reading this chapter, I felt like I was having an “Ah Ha!” moment in realizing the purpose of humans to tell stories.

This first chapter, entitled “The Work of Story”, explored an interesting explanation on the origins of storytelling.  From Lambert’s point of view, much of it has to do with human survival and endurance.  I found this significant since a major focal theme I am concentrating on in this class is adversity.  Lambert nicely explains that:

“The memories associated with our most important life lessons are inevitably those with either strong emotional encoding at the moment, as in traumas or events involving those close to us” (p.8). 

After reading this sentence, I thought about not only the pivotal moments in my life, but also those moments in history that other people have witnessed and felt compelled to report to the rest of humanity.  The Nazi Holocaust is a perfect example.  Under the cover of war, millions of innocent civilians were systematically executed while the German people never suspected a thing under the Nazi propaganda system.  It wasn’t until years after World War II ended, when people began listening to the growing number of stories from the survivors, did the public become more aware of the horrific slaughter.

Lambert also discusses how 20th century popular culture tapped into myths to help explore a industrial age society that was feeling dislocated as people were moving from the country to the city.  For example, he cites how the Western genre of film “showed us how to bring frontier ethics into our chaotic urban experience, mapping the pastoral ideal of self-sufficiency and family integrity onto a suburban ideal of the single family dwelling” (p.9).  Director John Ford was masterful in this genre with films such as Stagecoach, The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.  The author’s ideas of storytelling in American cinema got me thinking about another classic film: Jaws.

In the middle of the movie, the three main characters discus the origins of their tattoos.  Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) asks the boat captain Quint (Robert Shaw) about an old tattoo on his arm.  Quint tells Hooper it’s the name of a U.S. Navy ship he served on during World War II: The U.S.S. Indianapolis.  Prodded on by local sheriff Brodie (Roy Scheider), Quint tells the tale of how he survived a massive shark attack after the U.S.S. Indianapolis was torpedo by a Japanese submarine.  It’s one of the most memorable moments in film history, but when reading this chapter, the scene got me thinking about Lambert’s idea of storytelling.

In reality, those actual crew members from the U.S.S. Indianapolis who survived that horrific ordeal felt a need to tell that story years later for several reasons.  First, because they were on a top-secret mission to deliver the atomic bomb to be dropped on Hiroshima, they could not discuss what happened for many years.  Secondly, there reached a point after the end of World War II that people didn’t want to hear “war stories”, especially ones that ended in disaster.  Due to the fact that for many years, even decades, had passed before the truth could finally be told about the U.S.S. Indianapolis, it was up to survivors to keep the story alive so that others would understand the many sacrifices made by soldiers, sailors and airmen in harm’s way.  These such stories need to be told for the benefit of future generations.  Lambert mentions the importance of storytelling when he adds, “Story… works biologically to insure the total recall of those events which define we have ingrained as of greatest emotional importance to us” (p.8).

I’m looking forward to the next reading from Joe Lambert’s book.

Response: Chapter 2 of “New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Social Learning”

In the past three weeks, students, like myself, in the Learning with Digital Stories class (INTE 5340) at UC-Denver have been critiquing a variety of digital stories found on the Internet. There are a rich variety of perspectives I’ve seen, from people overcoming debilitating injuries to an old man recounting his time in a Nazi prison camp. Textbook readings, however, are not my favorite assignments.   This week, we delved into the second chapter of New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Social Learning. Whereas the first chapter dealt largely with the various definitions of literacy, this next chapter covers some new territory involving the concept of practices and how that relates to literacy.

Authors Colin Lanshear and Michele Knobel creatively illustate the term “practices”, as initially defined by Andrez Reckwitz, to the reader:

“In short, practices are routinized ways of moving our bodies, handling objects and using things, understanding and describing the world, desiring and conceiving of tasks and purposes, of treating subjects and so on (p.34).”

In this explanation, I feel the term “practices” sounds very much like the word “traditions.” The phrase “describing the world” almost could be interchanged with the word “storytelling.”  Now that I think of it, this description of practices sound very similar to the concept of folklore, where certain customs, including written and oral communication, were handed down from generation to generation.  Folklore seems in play a factor into Lanshear and Knobel’s theme of literacy.  They believe that literacy “enables meaning-making to occur or ‘travel’ across space and time, mediated by systems of signs in the form of encoded text of one kind or another (p. 40).”

“Ah ha!” I thought to myself. This was the moment where I could see the emerging link between literacy and digital storytelling (even though that phrase had not been mentioned).  Whereas a much of traditional folklore involved oral communication, when the message had to be “handed down” face-to-face, “literacy” requires the message to be put in writing or some other form that ensured “permanence and transcendence” (p.40).   Personal blogs are one example of this type of literacy.  The authors tie in James Gee’s concept of “Discourse” from the previous chapter in explaining how each individual views a blog based on what particular “group” that viewer believes he or she belongs to.

The second chapter certainly did engage my interest in how our society has gone from communicating from face-to-face to Facebook.   As I mentioned earlier, I watched a digital story about a survivor of a Nazi prison camp.  His name was Sy Bakker.   I imagine that in a time before social media, broadcast journalism, or even newspapers, such a story like Bakker’s would not have survived as an oral tradition.  It’s comforting to know that with the use of camera phones, computer editing and YouTube; Bakker’s story of adversity and endurance will be available to anyone with a computer and a broadband connection.

Yet, I have not once read the phrase “digital storytelling” in these first few chapters.  Still waiting for that even bigger “Ah Ha!” moment to come.

Chapter 1 of “New Literacies”

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Apple_IIe_original.jpg

 

According to Merriam-Webster, the term “literacy” dates back to the later half of the 19th century.  In the first chapter of New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Social Learning, authors Colin Lanshear and Michele Knobel appear to focus on how the term “literacy” in education became a more important concept than “reading & writing” in the latter half of the 20th century.  They give due credit to Paulo Freire’s findings regarding the importance of literacy, as well as the consequences of illiteracy, in the advancement of a society.  In addition, Lanshear and Knobel cite the results of the 1983 policy statement, A Nation at Risk, which set off educational and political alarm bells in the English-speaking world at a time when economies were moving into the computer age.  I reflected on this significance of this information when I thought back to my days in elementary school when we began learning how to use Texas Instrument personal computers.  At home, my parents decided to purchase an Apple IIE computer.  Back then, personal computers were more an investment in education rather than entertainment.

As with most assigned classroom readings, I found some of the information in this first chapter a bit difficult to understand, especially since my professional background is far from education.  Yet, I was interested in how Lankshear and Knoble connected the literacy crisis of the 1970s and 1980s with importance of digital literacy today.  In addition, the authors bring up the unique concept of “the literacy of participation’’(p. 26), which plays a major role in online education.   Nowadays, it’s important to not just learn by yourself but also to learn within a group and exchange information and viewpoints.  This dialogue of perspective seems to be the driving force behind digital storytelling.

If I had any criticisms about this first chapter, it’s that Lankshear and Knoble don’t talk enough about the role of technology in the discussion of digital literacy.  The mouse simplified the user interface with the computer.  The modem enabled both computers and users to communicate with one another across local and national boarders.  Word processing software made the composition process less time-consuming.   These advancements happened before Mark Zuckerberg launched the social network revolution in his Harvard dorm room.  Granted, our class has only read the first chapter, but I think it’s important to mention computer technology when there is a discussion regarding digital literacy.

To be honest, I’m very curious as to what the next chapters will discuss.  The cover of the textbook includes over a dozen technology icons that most people could identify, including a mobile phone, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Wikipedia.  In the last few pages of the first chapter, there’s a mention of a concept of “new literacies” in a social rather than a technological context.  That’s certainly something I didn’t consider when I was staring into a green monochrome monitor of an Apple IIE learning how to type up a book report.  It will be interesting to see how Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel further view literacy in the Web 2.0 era.