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Digital Story Critique – “Opening Doors”

Immigration is a very hot topic.  From American politicians (or pseudo-politicians) advocating a ban on Muslims from entering the United States to European leaders closing their boarders to Middle Eastern refugees from war-torn countries, there is a lot of concern regarding immigrants.  Most of the soundbites come from influential people in power.  The immigrants, many of whom come legally for educational or employment reasons, rarely get an opportunity to give their perspective.  That’s why it’s refreshing to watch “Opening Doors“, a StoryCenter video created by Tahira Hussain, a student from Pakistan.  She carries the responsibility of being the first person in her family to go to college.  For this critique, I judged the digital story on the following assessment traits (as established by Jason Ohler in his book Digital Storytelling in the Classroom):

  • Story – Hussain draws the viewer in by telling her story first-hand.  She gives a glimpse into the cultural traditions of her community in Pakistan, including the staggering difference between how a family is treated when a daughter, rather than a son, leaves for college.  Even before she got accepted into a college, she admitted she was “too scared to apply.” She also comments that she could not go to the local doctor by herself because she was “not allowed to go out without a man.”  By the end of the story however, Hussain seems more confident after completing her studies.  In addition, she remarks how she has inspired other women in her Pakistani village to get an education.
  • Originality, voice and creativity –  If Hussain had told this story in her native language, there might have been a greater emotional undercurrent in her voice, but she does a solid job of unfolding the timeline of events in English.  She includes a number of personal photographs from her childhood in Pakistan as well as her schooling in the United States, including photos of her creating banners in support of environmental causes.  There are also a couple of images, including a video clip of rippling water, that add abstract emotional layers to the story.
  • Media grammar –  It’s fairly evident that this was Hussain’s first time creating a digital story.  Some of the photos were scanned at lower resolutions and the audio level of the narration varies throughout the video.  Still, it’s not bad for a first effort.

As a tutor at the Community College of Denver, I often work with students from far-off places in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.  I sometimes wonder if each of these students have their own story to tell about leaving the world they were born into then and the world they live in now.   Even loud-mouth politicians could learn a thing or two from them.

 

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.

Digital Critique – 30 Years and 73 Seconds: The Challenger Disaster

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Tomorrow, January 30th, will be the 30th anniversary of the Challenger space shuttle disaster.   I remember, in that pre-social media era, hearing the announcement on the public address system at my middle school.   There will no doubt be a lot of reflection of that fateful day in the media.  One of those such retrospectives is on the website of KUSA Channel 9, a local NBC affiliate here in Denver, Colorado.  It’s called 30 Years and 73 Seconds: The Challenger Disaster.  What’s unique about this retrospective is that a good portion of the video footage was recorded from Cape Kennedy on that day.  The archived footage includes elementary school kids from Boulder watching the launch and seeing their stunned reactions to the incident, which NASA officials announced as a “major malfunction.”

We often think of digital storytelling as from the perspective of the ordinary citizen with a smartphone rather than from a local news reporter with a camera crew.   Since this particular digital story involves video content from the pre-YouTube era, it makes sense to incorporate broadcast journalism substance and style from the mid 1980s timeframe.

For this digital critique, I’ll focus on a few key areas:

  1. Research – The production team utilizes the archived video from 1986 well.  The narrator and on-air journalist, Gary Shapiro, was on the ground in Florida then to cover a feature about the group of Boulder elementary kids who were sent to watch the Challenge launch.   The web posting also includes an array of scanned photos, including the tragic photos of the Space Shuttle Challenger exploding.   In addition, there is quite of bit of up-to-date footage of those students who are now in their middle age as well as Shapiro himself.
  2. Sense of audience – This was one key area in which the digital content was strongest.  Anyone who was roughly the same age as the Boulder students could remember that day and how they felt both then and now.   In my case, I was able to sympathize with them in a pre-9/11 era when I thought this was the biggest tragedy I had ever seen on TV.   Fortunately, those students were able to overcome the adversity of that fateful day and witness the next shuttle lunch 18 months later.
  3. Media application – Like I mentioned in the research section, the production team made good use of the archived footage.  The cross-cutting better the past and the present bridged the 30 year time gap.  One criticism I have is the way the piece is narrated.   Like most television journalists, Shapiro uses a certain cadence, with the wide range of inflection, that I sometimes find a bit too formulaic.

Unfortunately, the website doesn’t offer much flexibility in being able to embed the video into this blog, so you’ll have to click the link and jump to a new tab.

 

 

DS 106 Daily Create: Old West Wisdom Sayings

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For a DS106 Daily Create this week, I chose “Old West Wisdom Sayings.”  There are 3 pages of Old West Wisdom phrases to choose from, but somehow I knew this phrase would be too good to pass up.  A simple Google image search of the keywords “horse” and “politician” came up with this often posted and mocked image of shirtless/brainless Russian president Vladimir Putin on a horse.   A quick Adobe Photoshop adjustment and out comes Western commentary on an Eastern political figure.