Discussion Assignment Six-Final Project Plan

For this week's assignment, you should select a topic for the final semester project you will be creating and begin creating a draft version of the project. As mentioned above, you should select some aspect of digital storytelling and create content on that topic. The project can be new content or a modification of existing content, but either way, it should include material that can be added to the Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling website.

At this point in the semester, you should select the topic you will use and begin developing a draft version of the project. You may create the final project in any format you wish, such as Microsoft Word, PDF, PowerPoint, as an HTML page. You may also create a digital story on your topic or use a digital story (or stories) to supplement a written document. Additionally, you may use any other type of media or Web 2.0 tools of your choice as the whole or part of the final semester project.

In the Feb. 21st class, I demonstrated a resource page for a presentation I will be giving at the Texas Library Association meeting in April. You may want to refer to this page as one possible guide for how a final project that you develop might look. The page is at: http://faculty.coe.uh.edu/brobin/TLA/

Post a comment here in which you briefly describe the project you are planning to work on. You may also include questions you have about the content of project, the techniques you plan to use, or any other related issues.

Discussion Assignment Six-Optional Resources

Please post comments here on any examples of how Digital Storytelling is being used in educational ways that you have previously found but not yet posted. However, please do not include any Web 2.0 resources for this week, as we will explore those types of resource during Week Eight.
 

Remember that you will have two weeks to complete this week's assignments, as we will not have new material added until March 9, 2009, when I return from an out of town conference.

New Dates Selected for Remaining Face-to-Face Classes

Hello Everyone,

Based on the discussion at yesterday's Saturday session, the remaining face-to-face classes will be held as follows:

Saturday, March 14 
9:00am - 12:00 noon

Saturday, April 18
9:00am - 12:00 noon

Saturday, May 9
9:30am - 12:300 pm

Required Final Class Meeting (presentation of final semester projects)
9:30am to 12:30pm
Everyone will bring brunch food --signup sheet will be posted in advance

All three class sessions will be held in Room 328 in the CITE Lab at UH.

 

Possible Dates for Optional Saturday Classes in March and April

I am responding to Christina's comment that she will be taking the Comprehensive Exam this coming Saturday and will be unable to come to our face-to-face class meeting. 

Unfortunately, there is never any one day that fits everyone's schedule. So, I am offering to hold another optional Saturday session in March, if there is enough interest.

Here's how the March calendar looks at this point:

Saturday, March 7 - not available, Dr. Robin out of town
Saturday, March 14 - available 
Saturday, March 21 - not available, UH Spring Break

Saturday, March 28 - available, but Doctoral Comps are being held from 9:00am to noon

Please post a comment here to let me know if you would be interested in attending another F2F session in March, probably on the the 14th, but it could be on the 28th if there is no conflict with doctoral comps.

Also, as long as we're looking at the calendar, it might be helpful to also see which dates in April are possible should we want another optional session then. Here's the way the April calendar looks:

Saturday, April 4 - available

Saturday, April 11 - available

Saturday, April 18 - available

Saturday, April 25 - not available, Dr. Robin out of town

So, please also post a comment here to let me know you would be interested in attending another F2F session on any of the first three Saturdays in April.

Thanks for your help with this.

Discussion Assignment Five

For this week's assignment, you have several choices:

• Try to find digital storytelling tutorials, workshop materials, training activities or "how to" information created by others  especially those that will help people create their own digital stories--and could be added to our EUODS website;
  

• Review the tutorial information on the current and former EUODS websites and discuss how these materials could be improved and expanded. Please be specific in your critique and suggestions;
  

• Examples of actual digital stories created by others that we could feature on our EUODS website.

When you have found a suitable example of one of the items described above, post a comment to Discussion Assignment Five, in which you include the following information:

• A description of what you found

• The URL of the resource

• The name of the author/developer(s) and any information about them, if available

• A brief synopsis in your own words of what the material is about, especially any information related to the intended audience, why it was created, and how it might be used

• Any other information you think would be helpful to visitors to our website if this material were added

New Poll: May 9 F2F Meeting

Since there wasn't much discussion on the topic of when to meet for our final meeting on May 9, I have gone ahead and added it as a poll question. Right now it is at the bottom of the blog under the last displayed posting. Please vote for your preferred time; you can vote for more than one option. To whomever voted a minute ago while I was creating the blog, your vote was not counted as I had to delete and recreate the poll, so please vote again. The poll will close the morning of Friday, February 20.

--Deidre

Comments about Conducting Research on Digital Storytelling

Hello Everyone,

I wanted to add a few comments about the various websites, articles and other resources you have all been finding and discussing over the last few weeks. 

Point 1: I am truly astounded at how much material there is on the web about digital storytelling and how it's being used in so many different ways. When I first became interested in DS, there really wasn't that much material available and I think it's really remarkable to see how much and how fast this field is growing.

Point 2. I really love the descriptions that you are posting about the material you find. This will be really helpful when we're ready to add new content to the EUODS website, because it's much better to have an annotated link, than simply another web link, and because each of you brings a different set of experiences to your descriptions, which should make them relevant to many more visitors to the site.

Point 3: You've probably seen where I've mentioned that you should be thinking about ways to categorize the information that students are finding and we've had lots of good suggestions about that. But I think it's worth repeating again that when it comes time for you to choose a final semester project to develop for this course, many of you will probably choose topics that include a large amount of information, so please keep thinking about how you might organize the content you will be working with so that visitors to our site will be able to find what they're looking for.

Point 4: Most of you are doing a great job! Keep up the good work. A few students however seem to have gotten busy doing other things. If you're reading this and haven't been posting for a while, please relax, take a few deep breaths and think about posting even a few brief sentences to let the rest of us know that you're still with us. You may try posting a follow-up comment to what someone else has written or take a few minutes and post a quick reflection on your personal blog. I know that I get busy myself and don't get around to replyingt to everyone's postings as much as I would like, but you can be sure that I'm reading every post and I'll try to add more comments and I hope you will too.

Last Point (for now):  Remember that we will have our next optional face-to-face session from 9:00am to noon on Saturday, Feb. 21 in Room 328 of the CITE Lab at UH. We will conduct a hands-on session with Microsoft Photo Story 3 during the first half of the session, followed by questions & answers related to weekly assignments plus initial discussions of final semester projects--and of course, any other topics you would like to bring up. I hope to see you there. 

Online Discussion Assignment Four

For this week's assignment, you should try to find specific materials related to:

• Digital Storytelling Research Projects
   

• Conference Presentations on Uses of DS in Higher Education
   

• other materials related to uses of DS in Higher Education, including Citations to scholarly articles *
  
  * Note 1: Unlike last week, you may include links to articles that require authentication since these resources may be of interest to scholars, such as instructors and graduate students conducting research on various aspects of DS for a book, master's thesis or doctoral dissertation; and these visitors to our website may have access or might be willing to find ways to access these materials. We may also want to consider adding a new section under Links on the EUODS website that is something like "DS Research."

Try to find at least one good article or other web-based resource about this aspect of digital storytelling. Again like you have been doing for previous assignments, please discuss why you think the article or resource should be added to our site.

NOTE 2: For some students, the assignment for this week may be related to the articles you found last week, if one or more of them were related to research projects. If so, you may use the article again, but for this assignment, please include specific information about the research that was conducted such as a description of the purpose of the research, the research questions, the methods used, and what results, if any were published.

When you have selected an article or other resource you think should be added to our site, post a comment to Discussion Assignment Four, in which you include the following information:

• The name of the article - please include the title-several time over the last few weeks, this information has been left out

• The URL of the article/resource

• The name of the author(s) and any information about them, if available

• The date the article/resource was written or produced and any other publication information, if found

• A brief synopsis in your own words of what the material is about, especially any information related to the purpose of research conducted, including research questions, methodology and results

• Any other information you think would be helpful

Digital Storytelling Multimedia Archive

Please review the following website:

The Digital Storytelling Multimedia Archive

After you reviewed thew site, please post a comment in which you discuss your reaction to this multi-campus research project on digital storytelling in higher education. Please try to be specific in your comments and include what you like, don't like, works great, doesn't work, needs more work, etc., any comments related to the navigation of the site, plus any other questions or suggestions you have.

Your comments will be sent to the developer of the site who has asked for our feedback.

May 9 Face to Face Meeting

Hi everyone!

Dr. Robin asked me to start a discussion about the final Face to Face meeting scheduled for Saturday, May 9, during which we will do our final project presentations. There are several possibilities:

-- Do the 9am-12pm time that has been done for the other Face to Face meetings
-- Meet later, for example 11am-2pm, and have everyone bring something for a potluck lunch to enjoy while we present our projects
-- Have an afternoon meeting, like 1pm-4pm

Do people have preferences, or other ideas? Personally, I prefer the lunch option or the afternoon option, but am willing to do any of them. Let's have a discussion in the comments, and then once we've all had a chance to say something, maybe we can do a poll question for the vote? If everyone who wants to say something can do so this week, then we can vote next week and that will let everyone plan ahead to attend the meeting.

--Deidre

Adding Hypertext Links in Blog Postings

A question was posted on the discussion blog recently about how to make the web links "hot" when posting comments on the blog. It's not too difficult but you do need to use a little bit of HTML code to do this. Here is what the link will look like.

You can click on this link to go to THE EUDOS WEBSITE

Instructions for how to do this are on the Week Three web page at:

http://courses.coe.uh.edu/brobin/6397/week3/week3.htm#Links

Discussion Assignment Three

Try to find one or two good articles about digital storytelling. The article(s) you select may be on any topic related to to Digital Storytelling, but again like last week, please discuss why you think the article should be added to our site.

Important Note 1: An article about Digital Storytelling is not the same as a website that deals with the topic. Articles tend to focus on a particular aspect of Digital Storytelling and will have both a title and the name of the author or authors who wrote it. What you are looking for are resources that can b printed out and read by people interested in DS and could be given out as reading assignments in schools.

Articles that are found online will often be downloadable as Word documents or PDF files or they may be part of a web page, but will not usually be a series of web pages like most of the ones that were found and discussed during Discussion Assignment Two.

Important Note 2: Before you begin this assignment, you should examine the current Articles page under the Links menu on the current EUODS site and the Resources page on the previous DS site to make sure that the material you select has not already been listed.

When you have determined which articles you found that you think should be added to our site, post a comment in which you include the following information:

The name of the article
The URL of the article
The name of the author(s) and any information about them, if available
The date the article was written and any other publication information, if found
A brief synopsis in your own words of what the article is about
Any other information you think would be helpful in describing the article

Also please add any ideas you have about a category system that we might use to present these articles, similarly to what was requested last week for the websites that were found.

Poll Question Added to the Blog

Please note at the top right of the blog screen that a poll has been added to the blog as a way to focus on the outcomes of Discussion Assignment Two-A.

This first poll allows you to vote on how the other Digital Storytelling websites that have been found and discussed on the blog should be added to the EUODS website. Please participate in the poll by voting on the option that you agree with most. If your vote is for item 4: "I have another idea and will post a comment in which I discuss my thoughts on this", please post a follow-up comment in which you discuss your ideas.

You may also post a follow-up comment here even if you voted for one of the other items.