Assembly Required - Wk10 Scholarly Article Response

I am in my third semester of the graduate program in eLearning Design and Implementation at The University of Colorado, Denver. Each week we critique a scholarly article in my Learning with Digital Stories course, ILT5340.

Once again Joe Lambert has provided inspiring insight into storytelling in chapter 5. The 7 steps of digital storytelling helped me unpack the process of creating a great story.

Visualizing the story first according to Lambert is the first step. I loved these clarifying questions:

1. What meaning and insight comes from the story?

2. How does talking about it make the storyteller or storyteller’s sounding boards feel?

3. Is there a scene, a moment, which acts as an axis point, to illustrate change?

These questions certainly sparked some creativity within as I’m beginning to explore the next story I will tell for this course. Lambert describes the process in which images, sounds, and sensory interplay needs to be created.

This chapter resonated because I often struggle with the starting point. What will the story be about? How will I tell it? What are the most important elements? Yes, I know we should start with a storyboard and I hope to learn more about that in the next chapter. However, the storyboard is a visualization tool and has it’s place after this process.

“Stories need to come from a deep place of insight with a knowing wink to the audience,” says Lambert. Stories that tease us into examining our own feelings and beliefs, stories that emerges from the storytellers move through their own journey of self-reflection.

Lambert warns the storyteller not to burden the beginning of your process with the external expectations. This is exactly what I had been doing! Outcomes, achievement, completion are naturally in my DNA. The expression of feelings well, let’s just say I’m a work in progress. This process encourages motivation born out of emotional resonance.

These questions seem helpful to tap into that feeling reservoir.

1. As you share your story or story idea what emotions do you experience?

2. Can you identify at what points in sharing your story you felt different emotions?

3. If you experienced more than one emotion, were they contrasting?

Lambert says understanding the contrast of complexity of emotions help the storyteller determine which emotions to include and in what sequence.

I found it interesting how Lambert pushes the storyteller out of the external expectation paradigm regarding the visual and audio tools to help the audience feel and hear the story. He encourages storytellers to visualize without concern as to whether the visual actually exists. After identifying what the visual means and/or conveys you can worry about how to create it.

Lambert does a great job in this chapter unpacking explicit and implicit imagery. He also explains visual metaphors and juxtaposition as powerful tools in creating a visual narrative to act as mediators between the narrator and the audience.

Lastly, Lambert shares a seemingly effective process for adding sound. He speaks to the voice of the story. Words, ambient sounds, music and the overriding question we should ask as storytellers:

1. Is this enhancing the story, or taking away from it?

From emotional honesty to the many layers digital stories can contain this chapter was an eye-opening peak into the process of creating compelling digital story content.