Youth Cutlture & Digital Media

Currently as a class we are learning how to create digital stories for our own projects that will be created based on interviews with a professor we have chosen. At first I viewed this as a creative way to present my subject's thoughts and views on the writing process and present it in a different medium other than essay format. It seemed easy enough at first: write a page and half with the most salient points, keep the story concise and cogent, make sure it has a message. Easier said than done. As an example we had to watch a sample digital story, and in my opinion it was 2/5 stars. The timing seemed a little off and while that seems a little picky, lining up the words, music, and pictures properly can have a drastic effect on how the entire piece is perceived. More importantly I never truly saw the point of the story. From the title I gathered it was an international student's journey to UR but story itself did not seem to capture all that the author wanted the audience to know. And personally the narrator's voice irked me for some reason (picky, I know).

Stories used to be strictly pen and paper and as the world and technology has progressed so have the ways in which stories are created and shared. Personally I thought I had seen them all...until I learned about digital stories. My discovery of digital stories is the same experience represented by Glynda A. Hull in her article "At Last: Youth Culture and Digital Media: New Literacies for New Times." She explores digital stories as a new way in youth connect to one another. I had no idea that digital stories were so popular. They are a viable way for students to learn about technology and integrate it into the learning process. Nowadays students not only have to learn basic reading, writing, etc (all things standard regarding academics) but they also need to be tech savvy. It is common practice to be able to type and expertly know one's way around the internet and ubiquitous programs like the windows triple threat (word, excel, and powerpoint). Technology is taking over the world and it is continuously pouring into academics at the earlier levels such as kindergarten, intermediate and middle school. It is only a matter of time before digital stories proliferate and become household words.