October 09, 2008 class meeting

During the October 09, 2008 class meeting, we listened to Leslie Rule from KQED. She explained how mobile technologies has changed the way we live by asking how many people in the room has a cell phone.

She also explained to us that digital storytelling started out with a mission to heal an individual from abnormal psychological experiences. The stories heal the individual who created the project, but can also help the audience with similar problems. There were concerns, of course, with the usage of digital storytelling, such as when the teller lies about certain things.

One of the issues that my classmate raised is whether the next generation of technologies, especially locomotive media, will change the way we create digital stories. Wouldn’t digital storytelling be less personal and less effective, he asked? Leslie said that digital storytelling will provide many people with the ability to participate in the process. Instead of one person providing information at a very deep level, we have many people providing a broad range of information that are also very deep. Storytelling has changed from a personal to a participatory activity. But the idea that a group of people can produce materials that are therapeutic and truly personally meaningful is a little bit unconvincing to me.

One of the things that intrigued me was Leslie’s description of authentic learning. According to her, authentic learning only happens when we can apply what we learn to create change within our society. Though I wish she had given us her scientific description of authentic learning, it was nevertheless a good vision for developers of educationally related materials.

At the end, we listened to a presentation on the new Chrome browser.