Heather Linville
Academic Director, English Language Center
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
April 16, 2010

We come to it with the ESL piece being the most important. The students’ classroom experience here is greatly enriched by the opportunity to do personal narrative.

Their program began (ca. 2004?) in collaboration with the U’s New Media Studio and Center for Digital Storytelling. They got a grant for 10 Macs and Final Cut. When I asked why they use Final Cut instead of something simpler, Heather said that by continuing to use Final Cut, they continue to get tech funding — though if an Ss has a different program, that’s okay.

From there, the university got excited about digital stories, and many other departments use it too.

Polina was the first to teach it.

Right now they use it in a class called Cross-Cultural Communication and University Life. Level 5, Advanced listening and speaking and academic English.

First time she taught it, she assigned them to do a digital piece about culture, as taught i the class. Liked the result. It had an academic tone to it. Next time she taught it, the assignment was just to do a story, but the pieces were still predominantly related to culture, but a little more informally than the first time.

It was harder to convince the students of the value of digital storytelling: that when you say ‘I’m going to tell a story’ you’re learning about writing for an audience, etc… We just had to tell them what they were learning (I guess cuz it didn’t feel like a valid intellectual, academic exercise and they needed it to be.)

The class was taught two times a week for 1.25 hour each for 15 weeks.

The first three weeks involved viewing of digital stories and taking apart and analyzing the story, piece by piece, using a structure for looking at it and answering questions.

Then she told them, “Now you’re gonna do your own, but it’s not due for almost three months.” Without that lead time, they would have panicked. First step, a one-week assignment, is to write your story. About 250 words is about 3 minutes.

Next week they have a story circle. Students tell their idea or read their written outline or script draft — “here’s my idea” – and the others give feedback in a positive way. “When I hear it, it makes me feel/think…”

Peer editing/process writing. Teacher is just the facilitator. They give Ss the choice: you can have T correct, or not. Most choose correction. The standard academic approach is that if it’s written, you correct it; if it’s spoken, it matters less.

The use an editorial code consisting of about 15 symbols for common proofreaders’ corrections.

Then they have Ss gather a bunch of images and record narrative with a partner or more, so the partner(s) can direct. They don’t do any editing so the piece has to be right. But since it’s long, often they’ll have it in several chunks. Then they slap the whole audio chunks into Final Cut, but without editing.

Sometimes they do a PowerPoint edit first: putting their pixs into PP and writing the accompanying script before recording it, and sometimes they want to make a change after that to the script. Then they have a couple Final Cut sessions. If there are more than 10 Ss in the class, they’ll break it into separate sections so each S can have a computer (10 total). They have a lab assistant during certain hours so they encourage Ss to sign up for time when s/he is there, so they can get tech help.

This class is not just about the culture narrative. Sometimes several classes go by (like during the S edit time) with no mention of the project. This is not a grammar class cuz these Ss are advanced, so instead they’re studying the culture curriculum. But language learning underlies that. I’m not sure to what extent.

Then the turn in their stories and check the sound and give to their Web guy to upload. They tend not to do any image manipulation, unless the Ss know how and want to. Then they gather and play all the stories at once as a class. And they’re also on their site, but it’s not an interactive thing, or just for ELC; all digital stories for all depts are collected on site

Ask Polina about student response to this methodology. But the Ss are proud of having a tangible product. Polina has also done some research into Ss’ use of digital technology and how Ss use it to contact their families, etc.

They use language to negotiate meaning, but faculty hasn’t researched specifically how effective is digital storytelling at teaching language. Though these Ss are advanced, Polina has used the curriculum for low intermediates with good success.

Technical literacy is another learning objective for this class.

They do a lot of peer scaffolding throughout.

After that they have about three weeks to assemble it on their own in lab outside of class.