Telling Our Tales

One of the major findings of my interviews is that digital story-making is an embodied learning experience. When I listened to the words they used, and to their comparisons between “traditional” assignments and digital story assignments, it appears that more of themselves is involved, physically and emotionally in addition to intellectually.

If life is like a box of chocolates, then
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Digital Storytelling is a lot like three dimensional tic-tac-toe
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As opposed to written assignments, which usually only involve effective use of text, successful stories challenge student to make connections (AND meaning AND effective arguments AND provocative statements) across dimensions of time, sound, and image.

Embodied: Combines visual, aural, and kinesthetic processes
Iterative: Production process encourages revisiting, reflecting on meaning
Multimodal: Enhances fluency across a range of media
Integrative: Connects prior experience, course, and other co-curricular learning
Authentic: Keep/share with others


Gail Matthews-DeNatale, Ph.D.
Associate Director, Academic Technology

“[Students] cannot learn in a deep way if they have no opportunities to practice what they are learning … they cannot learn deeply only by being told things outside the context of embodied action.”
JAMES PAUL GEE – What Video Games have to teach us about learning and literacy

Gee came to this conclusion by considering the experience of video gaming.

Yet digital authorship is also a complex, physical experience – one that includes most, if not all, of the “36 design principles” that Gee identified in his work on the relationship between games and learning. Yet we often gloss over this dimension of the experience.


Henry Jenkins – McArthur-funded New Media Literacies initiative
Play (experiment and problem-solve)
Performance (improvisation & discovery)
Collective Intelligence (pool & compare)
Simulate (model real-world processes)
Network (search, synthesize, disseminate