Digital storytelling brings a human connection to online education — from Faculty Focus by Deborah A. Raines
Once upon a time people told stories to share experiences and to teach. With the growing popularity of distance learning modalities educators have been searching for ways to enhance social presence and reflective thinking in the online learning experience. The use of digital storytelling might be a strategy to bring human thought and emotion into online education.
Since pre-historic times, storytelling has been a form of education and social connection. Storytelling allows persons to project their personal characteristics and to present themselves as real people to other participants. The process of creating a story is a mental process which challenges the learner to use critical thinking processes to examine information, question its validity and draw conclusions.
Digital storytelling is the art of telling stories with digital multimedia to share a reflective narrative. Through effective use of perspective, drama, emotion, context and sound, digital storytelling helps people to connect, explore and understand. Digital storytelling can provide a creative ingredient to make the online learning process engaging and can lead to deeper learning (Sharad, 2010).
Digital storytelling presents learners with a challenge to write, understand and communicate in a collaborative, persuasive, accurate and entertaining manner. The steps in creating a digital story as a teaching-learning activity are:
