Digital Stories of Coming to Learn
A community-based study of barriers and motivators to adult education for newcomer and low-income women
"Digital Stories are short, personal, multimedia tales. Written with feeling and in the first person there's a strictness to their construction: 250 words, a dozen or so pictures, and two minutes is about the right length. Considered narratives which subject themselves to strictures of form tend to elegance. Digital Stories -- when properly done -- can be tight as sonnets: multimedia sonnets from the people. […] Digital Stories are best made in workshops where participants come together to share skills and benefit from the assistance of facilitators. A workshop gives its participants courage, for making a Digital Story isn't easy. It can, though, be remarkably empowering and, when imagined as a tool of democratised media, it has -- I believe -- the potential to change the way we engage in our communities. At the BBC we created an itinerant workshop, a lab we could take out on the road: to miners' institutes and welfare halls, community IT suites and arts centres, schools and colleges."
~ Daniel Meadows, www.photobus.co.uk
In a digital storytelling workshop, participants work in a close-knit learning community, producing their own short (2-3 minute) digital videos that reflect multiple approaches to personal narrative and storytelling, from confessional to more experimental or poetic. The workshops represent a semi-formal, community- and arts-based learning experience through which participants explore issues of social identity and difference, and improve oral, written and computer literacy skills, while creating content meaningful to themselves and their communities. The digital storytelling process comprises several stages of production: sharing personal narratives in an oral "story circle"; creating storyboards; writing stories or "scripts" and recording them as voiceovers; collecting visual artefacts, video footage, and music; and combining and editing all these elements in a non-linear digital environment to create digital videos.
"In this age of increasing media monopolies, global media markets, and convergent media, mainstream media has struggled with its traditional methods of gathering news from diverse perspectives. […] This traditional approach has sharply contrasted with the rise of the community digital storytelling movement, a grassroots media phenomenon in which communities are creating their own short, three- to five- minute digital stories from the found material in their lives (digital video, photographs, letters, news clippings, etc). […] Though community digital stories are not professional productions, what community digital stories offer in terms of intimacy and authenticity is invaluable in providing multiple community perspectives on important life issues as well as providing an important and powerful forum for communities to tell their own truths in their own voices."
~ Third World Majority, www.cultureisaweapon.org