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While searching for teaching ideas in the summer of 2006, Farrand RAP Senior Instructor Kayann Short “serendipitously” stumbled upon something that would change the course of her teaching interests: digital storytelling.

Digital Storytelling is about the story first and foremost: a first-person narrative focusing on a meaningful personal experience. Unlike text-only essays [traditional tales], these stories are then coupled with photos, video clips, music and personal voiceovers to create a short movie about the experience they want to share.

Short is planning to bring digital storytelling to CU classrooms, after applying and teaching it within the Boulder community.

To Short, the shift from pen-and-paper stories to digital ones is intuitive; in a culture where YouTube videos gain world-wide attention, video is becoming the modern way to share  information. The summer she discovered digital storytelling, Short attended a workshop held by the at their satellite office in Denver.

After the three day workshop taught her how to produce a digital story, Short knew she had to share the experience with others. “Digital Storytelling empowers literacy,” Short explains as her reason for wanting to share the process with others. “The storyteller has a purpose, an audience. They feel like they see what literacy can really mean.”

Short speaks from experience. In the summer of 2008, with a CU Outreach Grant, she taught 4 women from , Boulder’s literacy program, the process of digital storytelling. Two spoke English as a second language, and all  had missed out on learning to read and write in her past. The opportunity to tell their story meant the world to these women, who otherwise may have not had the audience or the chance to do so.

Inspired by these women, Short received one of ASSETT’s Dean’s Fund for Excellence awards that allowed her to present what she’d learned at a MELUS conference this spring.  Short showed one the women’s stories, and used it to illustrate how empowering the process of sharing through digital mediums can be.

The success Short has seen with digital stories has motivated her to include it in her teaching at CU. Besides using digital storytelling in her classes as a mode of inquiry for student learning, she is working to invite the Center for Digital Storytelling to host a digital storytelling workshop at CU. She hopes this will show faculty and organizations around campus what digital storytelling can do for them. Short will also incorporate digital storytelling into an INVST (International and National Volunteer Service Training) class she is planning to teach in 2010.

In case you didn’t know, the is filled with students whose interests lie in volunteering in the community. Short’s plan is to create a collection of multi-generational stories about activism in Boulder. The students in her class will complete one portion of this puzzle, while elders involved with local organizations will fill in another. By the end, she hopes to have a compilation of inspirational stories that ask each person the question: What does community work mean to you?

These stories will then be put on the web, to inspire others to make a difference in their community. Finding the meaning in a personal experience is empowering not only for the storymaker, Short explains, but for the audience as well. She continues, “Once the digital story is out there, it can get a life of its own.”

Short hopes to show students that they can decide what is worth sharing with the world, and to inspire them to use these affordable technologies to expand the way they communicate with others. Short put it best when describing it to me:

“It’s not just those with a ton of money and access to media who decide what stories get to be told. Now the student makes the decision about what stories are important to tell.”

-- Written By: Kate Vander Wiede, CU '09, ASSETT Staff