This fall we worked with students from across campus on digital storytelling projects, but one concentration of this interest came from the department of Psychology.
Becca Kester
Dr. Jennifer Shewmaker and Cherisse Flanagan teach courses that welcome psychology majors into the program and then prepare them for careers after graduation. Both teachers integrated storytelling assignments this semester to help students articulate the commitments that drew them to the field.
After two successful workshops we hosted this summer with the Center for Digital Storytelling, we worked with our first groups of students this fall producing digital stories as a part of their courses. These student projects focused on three different areas:
• Two Cornerstone classes from the Honors College explored the potential of first-person narrative in first-year experiences.
• Two Psychology courses introduced first-person reflections on vocation into a capstone experience.
• Finally two other teachers looked at digital authoring as a way to communicate more traditional arguments (Proposing a Solution) or portfolio-type reflections on teacher training.
Thanks to the faculty and students in each of these courses for working with us to better understand the role digital stories play in the broader curriculum here at ACU.
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HONORS CORNERSTONE
All of the students produced remarkable stories. The following collection reflects the flexibility of the form to capture a wide range of experiences.
Media projects continue to gather strength across the curriculum, sometimes building on essential literacies of writing or speaking. This semester Dr. Laura Carroll’s English 111: Composition and Rhetoric students produced short video responses to the typical Proposing a Solution prompt. This is just a part of Dr. Carroll’s assignment:
Proposing a solution is a common writing task in personal and professional life. You call your audience’s attention to a problem, offer a solution, and urge the reader to act on your proposal. You will learn to analyze the problem, evaluate possible responses to the problem, select one solution, and argue the effectiveness of your solution to your audience.
Basic Features of Evaluation Essays
• A clearly defined problem, framed as a question in the early stages of writing
• An effective solution
• A convincing argument in support of the proposed solution
• Anticipation of reader’s objections and a response to those objections
• An evaluation of alternative solutions
• A call to action
The students came over to the Learning Studio for a training session in Camtasia for Mac which allowed them to bring together a variety of media types into their final projects. Here are a few examples.
This semester we asked a hundred freshmen in separate Cornerstone sections to take photos that included the Jacob’s Dream angels. Our object was to illustrate the way disciplines in the liberal arts attempt to provide a more complete view of the human and our relation to the divine.
Once uploaded to Photosynth, the students’ photos were combined into a “synth” which is a 3-D construction of the Jacob’s Dream site based on the many facets of the space captured in the photos. We then shot the space again, attempting to produce a careful survey of the site.
In his Cornerstone Spotlight presentation yesterday, Dr. Greg Straughn paralleled this first example with crowd-sourced initiatives that can leverage the wisdom of the group but sometimes without a coordinated plan or design. Scholarly research often approximates the second example that leveraged higher-powered tools (wide-angle and telephoto lenses) and moved around the site to create a greater degree of coverage.
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Getting Started with Photosynth
To explore each synth further, enter by selecting “Click to View” and then the full screen button in the bottom right. From there, explore each of the main views: the 3D View, the Overhead View, and the Point Cloud View. Thanks again to the students who contributed a nice range of images.
(Photosynth utilizes the Silverlight plugin developed by Microsoft and the following examples are not currently compatible with mobile devices.)
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Cornerstone Students – 172 photos (mostly phone photos)
