Discussion Assignment Eleven
For this week's assignment, we were originally going to explore the use of hardware choices that could be used to support digital storytelling. This would include things like digital cameras, scanners, microphones, video camcorders, etc. However, since this topic was used as a midterm project by a couple of students, much of this information has already been found. If you have already begun conducting research on this topic, you may post a comment about what you have found.
Another option is for you to try exploring some of the following information sources we have not touched on too much this semester--to see what you can find on the topic of "digital storytelling."
The University of Houston Library Encore Library Catalog
http://encore.lib.uh.edu
EdITLib Education & Information Technology Library
http://www.editlib.org/
Questia
http://www.questia.com/Index.jsp
The Chronicle of Higher Education
http://chronicle.com/search/
Slideworld
http://www.slideworld.com/
ERIC -Education Resources Information Center
http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/Home.portal
The Library of Congress Online Catalog
http://catalog.loc.gov/
The Free Library
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/
The Internet Public Library
http://www.ipl.org/
Fondren Library at Rice University
http://library.rice.edu/
EDUCAUSE Site Search
http://www.educause.edu/
Google Book Search
http://books.google.com/
Kosmix
http://www.kosmix.com/
Cuil
http://www.cuil.com/
t10
http://turbo10.com/
Intute
http://www.intute.ac.uk/
When you have completed your exploration, post a message in which you describe what you found and please try to add some supporting information about how useful you think this information/tool would be to visitors to our website.
Posts
24 comments:
Good idea Dr Robin.
Storytelling implies the shaping of the story as well as the sharing of it with others afterward. The advent of broad band Internet service expanded the possibilities of Digital Storytelling. The emergency of Web2.0 applications such as Blogger, Youtube, Facebook, Myspace and so forth offer new opportunities to share short self-representational stories.
The price of digital camcorder drops dramatically in recent years. Even some of them are particularly geared to Youtube or other social networking users. On the other hand, portability is emphasized in the development of camcorders and the quality of image is also critical. More and more popular, low price equipment are surfaced with high definition compatibility. I think this will be a thrust for DST implementation.
One of the famous portable devices is MinoHd, the world's smallest HD camcorder as the company claimed. It's only 3.3 ounces weight but can shot up to 60 minutes(4Gb build-in memory) of HD 720p, 30 fps video. Most importantly with build-in FlipShare software, you can browse, playback, edit and then upload to Youtube or email to your friend. I think it's pretty cool but not good enough for me to buy one.
http://www.theflip.com/store/MinoHD.aspxHere is the review and compare to another device Kodak Zi6.
http://www.macworld.com/article/136915/2008/11/flipminohd.htmlMy favorite and must-buy is DXG-576V. It's ONLY 3.17 weight and also powered with HD 720p shotting. Althought it only build in 32Mb memory, SDHC slot is available for extension which means you can have 16Gb and more. As a rival of MinoHD, it provides Rapid Blog Manager software to allow you upload and share videos on Youtube as well. I can't see any reason not to pick up DXG-576V instead of MinoHD so far.
http://www.dxgtechusa.com/new/products-list.php?pid=36reviews of DXG-576V
http://www.digitalcamcorderss.com/dxg-digital-camcorder.htmlMost importantly, you can have this amazing portable video camcorder ONLY $69.99 from costco. I can't wait to have one.
http://www.costco.com/Browse/Product.aspx?Prodid=11290079&whse=BC&topnav=&browse=&lang=en-US
My midterm project was reviewing hardware to do a DS. This are the facts that I posted:
1. A digital camera which ranges from moderate to high quality, depending on what you are using the DS for (educational vs informational).
2. Scanners are a great way for you to use images that have not been taken by a digital camera but is clear enough for the purpose of your DS.
3. Microphone-there are several types of microphones available that range from inexpensive to expensive, and size.
4. Speakers are also used for editing purposes. They can be attached to your computer or by way of a headset.
5. Recorders are used if you want to interivew individuals for your DS.
6. Digital camcorder is a great way to incorporate interview videos or to demonstrate "how to applications" or tutorials.
All of these electronics may be purchased online (Amazon.com) or you can purchase them at an electronic store (Best Buy, Fry's). You will then need to determine your budget and purpose of DS to make the appropriate purchases needed for the creation of the DS.
I just did a preliminary search with the at some of the database Dr. Robin suggested. The results are as follows
- EdITLib: 91 journal articles
- UH Encore Library Catalog: 28 books
- ERIC: 25 journal articles
- Questia: 199 journal articles , 114 newspaper articles and 1,402 books titles.
- Chrinicle of HE: 5 articles
Of these database, I think ERIC and EdITLib offer most fruitful searches for in-depth research on DS, and are easier to use.
I tried searching both cuil and t10 for "digital storytelling".
t10 came up with several sites, with the Wikipedia entry as the first hit. It seems OK as a search engine, but doesn't have any clear advantage over Google search, so I don't really see a good reason to add this to our page.
cuil, on the other hand, is pretty neat. It displays about 10 sites, many but not all of which are already on EUDOS, on the first page, each with a graphic and short description. The page is easy to read and navigate, and it gives you enough info to decide intelligently which links to click on. The, on the right side, it lists and links to other possible related searches, sorted by topic. I think this is quite useful, as often you don't think of the perfect search term right off the top. I really like cuil, and think we should consider a link from EUDOS.
Leon,
That was a really helpful review of digital camcorders. When I make purchases like this, it's often hard for me to know what to look for or what a reasonable price is. Are we adding reviews like this to the site? Something to consider, although we don't want to get into advertising for anyone...
Ahn,
I'm curious about what you didn't like about Questia. It seems to have generated by far the most hits, yet it wasn't one of your favorites. Was it too general? Or just not easy to use?
Deidre,
When I searched Questia with the descriptor "digital storytelling", the program understood it as "digital" and "storytelling", so the number of items it found is the largest, but as I scrolled down to read the titles, many of them are on "storytelling," not DS.
On the other hand, with the same descriptor, ERIC and EdITLib produced only items on DS, I didn't have to screen anything out. On ERIC and EdITLib lists are big names and very interesting titles. From my experience of using ERIC, we can find most of the articles from UH Database of subscribed journals. EdITLib seems to be the best resource on DS on the basis of the number of articles it offered, but I do not have access to it because I'm not a subscriber. I guess we can try UH database for it too.
Tatiana,
I like your post, because it does not give the feeling that creating a DS is a technically intimidating task, and everyone can do it with basic equipment and technical skills.
This brings to my mind that if we are going to extend the information on tools in EUODS, we should consider both beginners and users with more advanced skill levels.
I perused a few of the sites here is what I thought:
Slideworld
not very user friendly. No ranking system. There were many entries for DS, but there was no ranking system to help you figure out where to start. I prefer Slideshare.
Kosmix
took a while to load, and there was a lot going on on this page, but I liked how it has digital stories to watch.
Googlebooks,
great site if you want to peruse books before buying them.
Questia.
More user friendly. Still no ranking, but the abstracts help. Also a great place for research information for a DS
Eric
I prefer to use the free articles, which really limits the number of articles, but still helpful.
This is on a slightly different note, but I found a site, befunky.com that is great for manipulating images for a digital story. You can turn your images into cartoons, Warhols, sketches and many other visualy interesting formats.
I guess I do not like change. I use ERIC, Google and U of H Library for finding articles on most everything. I like those sources.
Anyway I looked at The Library of Congress, Online
(http://catalog.loc.gov). It is great for finding a list of books that have been written about the topic of digital storytelling but you still have to find the book to read it.
I also went to www.ipl.org This is the Internet Public Library. This resource to me was not that helpful and was a bit busy for navigating.
Lastly I went to www.intute.ac.uk This was an interesting site. Its purpose is to offer sources for information for education and research and there is much there for all subject matter. This would be a good source of information when creating digital stories about health dental gals as there is a category for that. It is a bit busy and navigating it would take some time. I don't think with my young ones it would be majorly helpful but grad students could probably find some use for the information at the site. It is worth a look.
Yo's post got me interested in Googlebooks, so I went and looked at that. While I'm not sure how useful it would be for DS (since it's a new topic, there aren't likely many books on it, and the ones that there are are almost surely in copyright still), it looks like a fabulous resource for personal and professional reading.
Regarding the number of items that are displayed when doing a search on the term Digital Storytelling in Questia, if you put the term in quotation marks, then it only searches on both words together. When I tried this the number of results went from 1917 (without quotes) to 61 (with quotes). Certainly, a much smaller number, but much more focused results.
By the way, you might also try this same technique of putting quotation marks around a term when using regular search engines like Google or MSN LiveSearch. Or you could try using a plus sign, so that you search on Digital + Storytelling. This reduces the number of results on some search engines but not all.
Yahoo seems to do a good job of trying to anticipate what you're looking for so, if you're primarily a Google user like me, you may want to try using Yahoo in addition to Google to see if it is a good choice when looking for DS mateials.
Searching for digital storytelling on the Rice Fondren library website yielded only 10 results, but a few of those were quite interesting.
The search tool automatically provides a percentage index on how relevant each search result is, and the evaluation seems quite accurate. In fact, the item marked as 100% relevant, was a good presentation about digital storytelling in libraries and museums.
In the presentation, seven examples of digital stories are provided that exemplify each of the seven elements of effective storytelling, and some discussion is provided on why it would be valuable for museums and libraries to embrace digital storytelling
The second search result was a webpage that the Fondren library has created with guides and resources on how to create videos and digital stories. A link to this page could be included in our digital storytelling webpage.
The Advanced search tool has several useful features. For examples, it allows you to search only for items added since the last time you logged on, or since the last week, or since the last month. Also, you can search for specific kinds of items, such as links, files, images, etc…
The last interesting results of the search is a link to the short courses offered by the Digital Media Center of Fondren library (DMC), which includes a 6 weeks “intensive hands-on” Digital storytelling workshop , where students “will learn both how to craft a compelling story and how to use multimedia software and hardware.”
However, the course is also open to the Rice community… maybe something similar could be set up at UH?
Tatiana and I collaborated on the hardware portion. I will make additional comments to the websites I looked at:
Questia, can be found at http://www.questia.com/Index.jsp is an online book and journal website. You have to be a registered user. The registration fee is full use is $19.95/month. I’m sticking to free websites.
The link to Educause is found at http://www.educause.edu. I could not find our website here.
I like the layout of the Kosmix website. Your website came up on the first page of this search. The layout of this site gives the title of the searched site in bold letters. It then gives a short description of the searched site followed by a link to the site. It is very clean and user friendly.
I also like the cuil website, http://www.cuil.com/. Your website did not get displayed under the “digital storytelling” search. I had to use “educational uses of digital storytelling”. Both CUIN 6397 and your current digital storytelling website did show up on the first page of the search. I also like the layout of this website. The search engine with Kosmix may be easier to navigate.
Using “educational uses of digital storytelling”, I was able your old website in power point presentation format on SlideWorld. One of the slides had a problem and could not be viewed. I’m not sure site would be very useful for me. Once I got to this website, I could not navigate back to your website.
http://electronicportfolios.com/digistory/tools.html
At the site listed above, is a list of tools that are commonly used in digital story telling.
Reading through comments alot of good information is out there on digital camras which is good because I am still lost in all this
Tatiana,
I think your list of tools/hardware was very straightforward and to the point. It could be useful to those individuals that are being introduced to digital storytelling. I also think this would be ideal for the website.
I found EdITLib Education & Information Technology Library
http://www.editlib.org/
very informative. I entered "Digital Storytelling", and got numerous results/searches, ranging from powerpoints, articles, and abstracts. The only drawback for the abstracts you have to be registered.
I also felt Questia was not user-friendly. Thanks to Dr. Robin's suggestion, it did make it a little easier to find the articles. Having to put the plus sign may not something one may think of doing when looking up "digital storytelling".
Leon, Great job researching portable camcorders. I own a Flip camcorder and can attest to how user friendly it is, but I like your choice for the DXG. It appears to be just as user friendly, and have the same capabilities as the Flip, but without the higher price tag. It makes it possible to use them for creating DS in the classroom.
I will definately look into the two camcorders that Leon suggested when I purchase one in the next few weeks. Thanks for the articles.
Tatiana,
the list of DS hardware is really useful for educators of people who want to produce DS project.
I’ve really enjoyed reading everyone’s post; Leon, I especially enjoyed your thoughtful comments. I looked at several of Dr. Robin’s suggested sites and found kosmix to be my favorite. I entered the search string, “Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling,” to which our EUDOS was listed first, along with five other related site. What I liked most about kosmix is the aggregation of several different web resources from the initial load or home page. This is a relatively welcomed methodology for content delivery.
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