Principles and Theories of Digital Storytelling
Digital Stories are an effective vehicle for imparting knowledge to the reader in an engaging and inspiring method. In this essay, I will investigate and explain the Principles and Theory of Digital
Storytelling, How Digital Storytelling can be used in the classroom and what possibilities for the future there are in education for Digital Storytelling.
“Digital Storytelling is the practice of combining narrative with digital content, including images, sound, and video, to create a short movie, typically with a strong emotional content” (Educause, 2007)
Since time began, stories have been used as a means of educating people and over time, there have been many innovative ways, such as comics and cartoons, created to engage and inspire people to read and to learn. Educause continues onto say that there are different types of digital stories with the main ones being historical, instructional, persuasive or reflective.
According to Wikipedia (2013), Digital Storytelling has been used by Ken Burns in the documentary
“The Civil War where he used heart-felt and emotional first-person accounts, in conjunction with old images and film footage, background music and narration to portray this tragic event in American history (Sylvester and Greenidge, 2009). During the 1970s and 1980s, the Centre for Digital
Storytelling emerged and its founder, Joe Lambert, produced the “Digital Storytelling Cookbook” which is a handbook describing how to create digital stories.
In the “Digital Storytelling Cookbook”, Lambert covers the seven aspects of digital storytelling, namely
(Lambert, 2007):
The seven principles of Digital Storytelling are:
1. Point of View
The Point of View identifies the purpose of the story, as in whether it is to be instructional, entertaining, thought provoking or stimulate discussion and the message being conveyed to the viewer. For