Digital Storytelling Experiences Research Articles

Understanding children’s use of a mobile digital storytelling app

ABSTRACT Storytelling plays an important role in early childhood education. Advances in digital technology have allowed storytelling to expand into shared and collaborative experiences. While mobile apps have enabled children to engage in creating digital stories, there has been relatively limited research on how children create and engage in digital storytelling experiences in ‘in the wild’ mobile environments. In this study, we developed Animation Kit, a digital storytelling application that enables children to create and share short and simple animated stories. We conducted a thematic analysis on a random sample of 200 animations submitted to the app's gallery and conducted semi-structured interviews with three heavy users to gain insights into their creative appropriation, sharing, and collaboration behaviours. Our analysis revealed several interesting forms of appropriation of sharing and collaboration and strong demand for communication. Based on the insights gained through data analysis, we propose design implications for digital storytelling platforms, such as a nonlinear storytelling approach contests and an asset-sharing system that empowers users to share their creations with others and one that can maintain a history of user edits.

IS DIGITAL STORYTELLING FUNCTIONAL IN SOCIOSCIENTIFIC ISSUES? PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS' EXPERIENCES

This study sought answers to the following question: “Is digital storytelling functional in teaching socioscientific issues?” In the framework of the study, digital stories were prepared individually by nine pre-service teachers on nine different socioscientific topics to find the answer to this question. The data of the present study, which was conducted with action research, were collected by using two different methods: pre and post-interviews and digital stories. Content analysis was used to analyze the interviews and the digital stories were analyzed by using the "digital story evaluation rubric". According to the results obtained during pre-interviews, the participants did not have digital storytelling experience before and did not have much knowledge about digital storytelling. After the implementation, the participants had predominantly positive views towards digital storytelling and that the digital storytelling could be a functional method in teaching socioscientific issues. When the participant products (digital stories) were evaluated in line with the criteria in the literature, it was concluded that the digital stories were prepared at a very satisfactory level, but the content part in the digital stories prepared by the participants lacked discussion questions about the selected socioscientific issues and the issues could not be addressed in an impartial way.

SLA Doctoral Students' Collaborative Digital Storytelling Experiences and Perceptions

SLA Doctoral Students' Collaborative Digital Storytelling Experiences and Perceptions

History education done different: A collaborative interactive digital storytelling approach for remote learners

Social interaction has been recognized as positively affecting learning, with dialogue–as a common form of social interaction–comprising an integral part of collaborative learning. Interactive storytelling is defined as a branching narrative in which users can experience different story lines with alternative endings, depending on the choices they make at various decision points of the story plot. In this research, we aim to harness the power of dialogic practices by incorporating dialogic activities in the decision points of interactive digital storytelling experiences set in a history education context. Our objective is to explore interactive storytelling as a collaborative learning experience for remote learners, as well as its effect on promoting historical empathy. As a preliminary validation of this concept, we recorded the perspective of 14 educators, who supported the value of the specific conceptual design. Then, we recruited 15 adolescents who participated in our main study in 6 groups. They were called to experience collaboratively an interactive storytelling experience set in the Athens Ancient Agora (Market) wherein we used the story decision/branching points as incentives for dialogue. Our results suggest that this experience design can indeed support small groups of remote users, in-line with special circumstances like those of the COVID-19 pandemic, and confirm the efficacy of the approach to establish engagement and promote affect and reflection on historical content. Our contribution thus lies in proposing and validating the application of interactive digital storytelling as a dialogue-based collaborative learning experience for the education of history.

Power and Powerlessness in a Group Based Digital Story Telling Project-An Exploration of Community Perceptions of Health Concerns in Urban Malawi.

Digital Story Telling (DST) is an art-based research method used to explore embodied experience of health and initiate dialogue with under-represented groups on issues affecting them. It involves engaging participants to create and share their stories using photos, drawings, and audio recordings in short videos. Benefits of DST include enhancing co-creation of knowledge, empowering participants to confront dominant narratives and revise inaccurate representations. We report our experiences and reflections of using DST to explore community perceptions of health concerns in urban Malawi. Community leaders were briefed about the project before and after study related activities. Three participatory workshops were organized to train community members in DST, support them to develop videos and discuss their experiences of DST. Twenty-six participants from two high density urban communities consented to be part of the workshops. They were all new to DST. All the 26 participants were invited together to the three workshops and their DSTs were developed in smaller groups (n = 7), based on their geographical location. Although we engaged residents from selected communities to share priority health concerns, all the seven groups presented challenges pertaining to Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH), and their powerlessness to address the complex challenges. The collective focus on WASH showed that DST effectively empowered communities to present priority health concerns. The inability of community members to address the challenges without external assistance or failure to use findings from DST to generate social change however raise questions on the ideals of empowerment and social justice. In addition, lack of financial resources or technical know-how to produce digital stories and unequal power relationships between service providers and community, may affect the use of DST for community activism among socio-economically disadvantaged groups. We conclude that DST empowered participants to articulate genuine health challenges that they felt powerless to address. We question the realization of “empowerment” and social justice of vulnerable participants in cases where structural challenges present obstacles to effectively address social inequalities.

Digital Storytelling Experiences of Primary School Students in Distance Education: An Analysis on Students' Perceptions of Collaborative Working

This research aimed to examine primary school students' experiences of preparing and using digital stories and their perceptions of collaborative work in distance education. This qualitative case study consisted of 36 fourth grade primary school students determined by easily accessible case sampling. Data were collected through questionnaire and semi-structured interviews prepared by the researchers. The survey data were subjected to descriptive statistics and content analysis was employed in the analysis of semi-structured interview data. The results indicated that primary school students could work collaboratively, prepare and present homework with the use of digital storytelling (DS) in distance education. In addition, primary school students were able to express themselves, interact with each other and had a high level of participation in the lesson conducted with DS. Based on the results of this research, it is suggested to conduct collaborative studies such as digital storytelling in distance education.

Augmenting television narratives using interactive home appliances

ABSTRACT This study focuses on the use of everyday objects as new media for enriching digital storytelling experiences, especially as they pertain to viewing television narratives in living room environments. Through a design ideation workshop, we develop a strategy for augmenting television narratives using interactive home appliances. The ideas obtained through the workshop revealed that interactive home appliances connected to television systems can serve as both input and output channels capable of delivering narrative elements as additional output and can support active viewer engagement in narrative manipulation. Another strategy involved mirroring the environments of television narratives with the physical world to enable spatial immersion into such narratives. Based on the strategies, we discuss the criteria valued by the designers when it comes to designating interactions between home appliances and television narratives and the critical aspects that should be considered in further configurations and applications of such strategies.

Transforming Preservice Teacher Perceptions of Immigrant Communities Through Digital Storytelling

Background: As diverse communities continue to be targets of racism and anti-immigrant sentiments permeate current political discourse, the need to prepare a teaching force that understands immigrant children and their families continues to be a critical priority. Purpose: This study explored the ways in which one digital storytelling project that required 20 clinical hours working with English learners (ELs) engaged preservice teachers in learning about immigrant issues. Methodology/Approach: Data in the form of critical reflections, digital storytelling video transcripts, and archival data were collected from undergraduate teacher education candidates over three semesters. Narrative data from participants were analyzed using thematic narrative analysis. Findings/Conclusions: The findings of the study are organized into themes that included enriching experience, transformed attitudes, and stories of resilience. The results showed the ways that preservice teachers’ dispositions about immigration were challenged and how much their understanding of the experiences of ELs was deepened through the experience. Implications: This study offers insight for teacher education programs and shows how experiential pedagogical tools such as digital storytelling and authentic clinical experiences can challenge existing and problematic beliefs and assumptions, helping to build a cadre of teacher advocates of immigrant children.

Digital storytelling in the world economy classroom

This study aims to share the digital storytelling experience of higher education teachers including those using English as a Medium of Instruction. The methodology consists of giving a task to 130 students of bachelor course divided into 29 creative groups. Students created video stories on prearranged topics concerning the world economy agenda. We focused on analyzing the stages of project creation and the role of a teacher in the process, drivers of successful implementation of the digital storytelling, and compared the effectiveness of different types of classwork with digital storytelling. Thus, we conclude that such factors as the cohesion of the creative groups, ability to use video editing instruments and distribution of the tasks between members in the initial stages play the least important role in the successful implementation of the task, but at the same time can be most easily influenced and course-corrected by a teacher. The research also demonstrated that the potential to connect the topic with the own interests of the creative group, ability to present the result of work publicly and interest in the topic were the main drivers for success and involvement. Those are the characteristics of the generation Z, and we strongly believe that the teachers of higher education should consider the findings we present in the results section. It is also revealed that digital storytelling, despite being time-consuming, has a more emotional influence on students and gives them more satisfaction after a presentation.

Towards Emancipatory L2 Instruction: Exploring Significant Learning Outcomes from Collaborative Digital Storytelling

<p style="text-align:justify">Digital storytelling has undergone extensive study in different content-areas, but its naturally-combined use with collaborative writing for skills development, and reflective practice remains underresearched in pre-service EFL teacher education. This study undertook joint tech-enhanced retelling of L2 texts by 56 Turkish EFL teacher candidates, rubric-based peer and teacher assessment of final products, comparative analysis of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) between outliers, and process evaluation using the significant learning taxonomy to explore impacts on L2 writing performance, academic learning, and personal growth. Despite assigning lower scores than the teacher-assessors, especially to the top-performers, the majority of peers successfully fulfilled the job, effectively performed the future reviewer role, and positively reacted to co-construction, and technology integration. CAF and reflection analyses indicated that the biggest difference between the highest- and lowest-scoring groups lay in grammatical accuracy, and lack of mutual interaction could account for the less cooperative group’s poorer performance. The classification of their post-task responses into six kinds of learning gains (foundational knowledge, application, integration, human dimension, caring, and learning how to learn) also revealed that their collaborative digital storytelling experience (CDS) elicited more procedural, critical, creative and practical thinking on the academic learning front, while disciplinary and integrative thinking may have declined due to more immediate preoccupation with task achievement. Their critical thinking was mainly organised around consensus-reaching, fluctuating membership, and logistical challenges, and most demonstrated a clear understanding of the role of positive group dynamics in group outcomes. Despite heightened awareness of the performance-boosting, character-forming, and motivational benefits of collective scaffolding and multimodal meaning-making, a minority could also discern the instrumentality of innovative teaching techniques in their future classroom practices.</p>

“Let Them Talk!”

Visits to cultural heritage sites are generally social in nature, yet resources to support these sociable experiences are often individualized, catering to the solitary visitor. Digital technologies offer means to disrupt this predicament, encouraging social engagements in cultural contexts. Here we present the results of a user study that systematically investigates the effects of face-to-face group conversation and physical interactions within a digital cultural storytelling experience at the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük, with the objective of promoting engagement, learning, and perspective taking. Seeking to articulate the benefits and weaknesses of promoting social interactions in digital storytelling settings, we start with a story-based experience that was designed for individual use, we extend it with novel system-driven interaction prompts, and then we evaluate the two versions with 102 participants. Our findings provide statistically significant evidence that conversation is related to longer and more absorbed participation in the experience and greater learning regardless of personality traits. Where social interaction is purposefully integrated into the story, more conversation is generated, and these interactive prompts do not disrupt the story flow even though participants report awareness of them. Finally, certain tendencies among users affect their talkativeness and enjoyment, providing future designers of digital stories with guidance to better address audience needs.

Digital Storytelling Experiences and Outcomes with Different Recording Media: An Exploratory Case Study with Older Adults

Digital storytelling is an advantageous practice for older adults. Although researchers have widely studied the effects of various recording media on users, including even their feelings of loneliness, to the best of our knowledge, there is no study that distinguishes and compares those effects within the digital storytelling process. In this exploratory case study, we tried to gain further insights into older adults' technology-mediated storytelling, the interactions, and the outcomes that different kinds of recording media have on users. Therefore, three storytelling components (paper notebook, voice recorder, and web platform) were used to probe their usability and emotional outcomes on five pensioners in Greece. Semi-structured interviews and questionnaires, among others, were implemented for data collection. According to the results, there was a variety of benefits and shortcomings for each tool. However, the web platform had a clear effect on decreasing users’ loneliness. Implications and future work on digital storytelling are discussed.

Digital Storytelling Experiences of Social Studies Pre-Service Teachers

The purpose of the present study is to determine the pre-service social studies teachers’ opinions about digital storytelling process that they were experienced during 2018-2019 fall term. Mainly, their attitudes towards learning and teaching are tried to determine according to their opinions after their digital storytelling experiences. This study employed an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) as a framework. Pre-service teachers were encouraged to create their own digital stories by telling the story along with the pictures through programs like windows movie maker, IMovie and so on. Data were collected through a survey and with semi-structured face to face interviews. A survey developed by researcher was given to all students who were enrolled to democracy and human rights course in 2018-2019 fall term and a total of 37 students completed it. Six pre-service social studies teachers in the group were selected for face to face interviews depended on their answers to survey questions. Three of them were who generally stated most positive views towards the digital storytelling process and other three were who generally reflected the challenges and difficulties during the process.

Digital storytelling experiences among school-aged students captured through doodling activity

With the fast-growing and constant evolution of modern technology, the use of digital interactive media such as digital storytelling is considered as a useful tool and technique in disseminating health-related information to clients. This study aims to explore the lived experiences of school-aged students during digital storytelling about a boy and his undesirable food choices. A descriptive phenomenological method was used for participants. There were 15 grade one students, ages six (6) to seven (7) years old chosen through purposive sampling. Doodling and participants' interpretations were the instrument of choice of the researchers, considering the age and level of cognitive development of the participants. In this study, four major themes were identified and discussed that depicted the participants' lived experience. They were identified as (1) positive perception in which the participants were able to identify healthy foods in the story; (2) empathy where they were able to project themselves as the main character in the story; (3) identification of negative elements which was symbolized by the chip monster that they needed to avoid or remove; and (4) interpersonal association where they related their digital storytelling experience to their family. The participants had varying degrees of connection and understanding with the digital story and undoubtedly expressed a learning experience through the digital story presented.

Narralive – Creating and experiencing mobile digital storytelling in cultural heritage

Storytelling has the potential to revolutionize the way we engage with cultural heritage and has been widely recognized as an important direction for attracting and satisfying the audience of museums and other cultural heritage sites. This approach has been investigated in various research projects, but its adoption outside research remains limited due to the challenges inherent in its creation. In this work, we present the web-based Narralive Storyboard Editor and the Narralive Mobile Player app, developed with the objective to assist the creative process and promote research on different aspects of the application of mobile digital storytelling in cultural heritage settings. The tools have been applied and evaluated in a variety of contexts and sites, and the main findings of this process are presented and discussed, concluding in general findings about the authoring of digital storytelling experiences in cultural heritage.

Prospective English Teachers' Digital Storytelling Experiences Through a Flipped Classroom Approach

The purpose of this case study was to explore prospective English education teachers' (PEET) experiences of digital storytelling (DST) through a flipped classroom approach. 36 prospective teachers who enrolled in a computer literacy course participated in the study. The data was collected through a demographic questionnaire, three open-ended questionnaires, and a semi-structured interview form. Four videos were prepared to give theoretical input in line with the DST phases described by Robin and presented asynchronously via Edmodo system. The results showed that PEETs described the DST process through a flipped classroom approach. described as entertaining, challenging, and instructive. Moreover, according to the results, PEETs learnt specific strategies about DST, were inspired, and had the opportunity to check their product quality, thanks to the flipped classroom approach. These results revealed insights about the design of a flipped classroom approach and the DST process.

Flow, Staging, Wayfinding, Personalization: Evaluating User Experience with Mobile Museum Narratives

A multitude of challenges comes into play when attempting to design (and evaluate) an interactive digital storytelling experience for use by visitors in a museum. This paper reports on the evaluation of the prototype mobile-based storytelling “guides” designed, developed and deployed as part of a research project at the Acropolis Museum in Athens, Greece. Experiences designed for different visitor profiles were evaluated several times throughout the iterative design process, in a number of on-site studies, and with more than 180 museum visitors of all ages (with this paper reporting on two studies conducted with a total of 53 users visiting individually or in pairs). The evaluation methods included ethnography (i.e., observation of visitors in the Museum’s galleries), pre- and post-experience in-depth interviews and questionnaires to measure the Users’ Experience (UX), as well as data logging. The analysis of the data focused on themes representing components of the experiences, such as interactive story plot and narration, staging and way-finding in the physical space, personalization and social interaction. Our findings confirmed that understanding UX and what makes it effective or not in the rich context of a cultural setting is a complex endeavor. The paper discusses our findings and proposes relevant recommendations for the design of digital experiences for cultural, educational, and recreational purposes.

Impact of digital storytelling experience among people living with dementia

Impact of digital storytelling experience among people living with dementia

Using digital storytelling to extend the flipped classroom approach

Recent years have brought the need for new pedagogical approaches that appeal to the involvement and participation of learners in the learning process. One of these approaches is the flipped classroom, which gives to learners the possibility to prepare for the next class, through pre-recorded video lectures and close-ended problems. Many studies merely replace in-class instructions by videos and use class time for group discussions. Nevertheless, what instructional design framework should we use in planning the overall flipped classroom approach? This paper attempts to answer this question through exploratory studies conducted in Algeria University. The purpose of this case study was to explore English education learners' experiences of digital storytelling through a flipped classroom approach.

Using digital storytelling to extend the Flipped classroom approach

Recent years have brought the need for new pedagogical approaches that appeal to the involvement and participation of learners in the learning process. One of these approaches is the flipped classroom, which gives to learners the possibility to prepare for the next class, through pre-recorded video lectures and close-ended problems. Many studies merely replace in-class instructions by videos and use class time for group discussions. Nevertheless, what instructional design framework should we use in planning the overall flipped classroom approach? This paper attempts to answer this question through exploratory studies conducted in Algeria University. The purpose of this case study was to explore English education learners' experiences of digital storytelling through a flipped classroom approach.