I came out of the first Digital Storytelling class this semester with the expectation to have another Gardner Campbell experience. You may recall that I took Campbell’s Rock/Soul/Progressive freshman seminar a couple of years ago. I can say I basically did relive that experience just by the Meta nature of this course as well as the hands-on interactive projects we did throughout the semester.
My favorite assignment was the Daily Photo assignment where we had to post four photos based on certain subject/style criteria. It was that assignment that really drove in one of the points of this class for me—that is, you don’t have to be some sort of professional to get up on Flickr and play around with a camera. You don’t have to be a professional to explore Internet tools in general thanks to Web 2.0. I can say I really did not enjoy all of the reading at the beginning of the semester (and quite honestly did not read the entirety of any of those incredibly long articles), but I see how they were pretty essential before we got to doing the more fun hands-on stuff. They prefaced the significance of the experiences we had in playing with audio and visual tools, as well as blogging and working on our projects. I particularly enjoyed using Audacity. It was funny when we got to class one day and Jim Groom told us to download Audacity, because I had already downloaded it since it was the first online recording tool I found to record my great-grandmother for my project.
The usability of Audacity is what made my project more than a simple digital text copy of my great-grandmother’s memoir. The activities we did in class on Audacity helped me get a better grasp on how to edit the recordings I made, which made for a much simpler and less time-consuming project. As for the story itself, I started to realize how much of just being present on the Web at all makes for a story. Within the blog for my great-grandmother’s memoir, I told the story of trying to tell her story. I had so much of an issue with figuring out what story I really wanted to tell and found that trying to “spice up” grandma with videos was a much more daunting and unnecessary task than I had originally thought. In the end, I like that there is a sort of introductory video where you can get an idea of the characters, which proceeds to tell more about the characters in the memoir.
I really can’t claim that anything I did or didn’t do for or in this class is not a part of the story. Even the procrastination is part of the story. When I say “the story” here, I basically mean the Jim Groom experience. It was a good experience really, and I’m pretty sad it’s over.
