Reflecting on digital storytelling: past, present, and future at DS106 Radio Summer Camp

So it naturally pushed us toward education, but but because of my background in theater and in particularly in what was called solo performance in the 80s, working with the Whoopi Goldbergs and the Spaulding Grays and Eric Bogosian and all these characters that were frankly, a cheaper way to produce theater because there's just one person on stage. But we learned a lot about personal storytelling, and we learned a lot about the shamanistic value of somebody getting deep into their own story and and projecting it in the world. We were bringing in that intelligence into this let's play with Premier 1.0 and Photoshop 1.0 in 1992. You know, we like the idea that this would become both a very deeply personal expressive space, but also a collective social space for people to do work together... So the creation myth of our version of digital storytelling, which was Once Upon a Time Dana got invited to hold the first digital video production workshop in the United States at the American Film Institute in February of 1993, and so we did a workshop and at the end of the workshop it took two days to render the files, so it was two days later, so we screened all the movies from the workshop.
And so what happened over those first two to three years is we began to develop our methods and say here's the way a workshop works and here's the way we bring people into story in our seven elements of digital storytelling. We got Apple to pay for the publication of the first cookbook at a digital storytelling festival in '96, and suddenly we had a method. And, side by side, we had a national community through our annual festivals that happened, you know, first five years in Crested Butte and a couple of years in Sedona. We had a way to talk to all the other makers who were doing interesting things, but our workshop became kind of the anchor of that particular national/international community. Moved to Berkeley in '98. Became the Center for Digital Storytelling. We had been called the San Francisco Digital Media Center, and CDS remained the same until, you know, 2015, essentially taking this method from a very local kind of process in San Francisco's Mission District to a national/international project that had us working in countries all over the world. As it has, you know, we traveled everywhere: to all 50 states, some 93 countries so far, and we've done all sorts of work, now, you know, along the way, people were thinking about digital storytelling and education, in particular, in a new way. Roughly between '98 and 2006.

I think, that for me is always the most interesting piece. For me, I thought social media was a key space where if students had their own domain, they had their own website or blog, or you name it, they could start telling those stories and narrating their learning and by definition decenter the class and create a networked effect of learning, which I think was a really powerful idea. People like Gardner Campbell have been talking about network effects like this - it was a powerful vision, and I think DS106, at least as I saw it develop from 2010 to 2012, was a really good example of kind of harnessing network effects to allow students to realize their learning in a collective. They were able to kind of share their work and get feedback, not just from the faculty member at the center, but from people who were in Portugal, Australia, Japan - it kind of came from everywhere.
So that's kind of 2010, 2011. I think our inspiration, Joe, was to some degree the politics of the birth of the MOOC. There was discussion in higher ed with people like Stephen Downes and George Siemens about this creation of a free online open class, which later became tagged as a MOOC. I was very interested in that idea, and so we had a great group at Mary Washington. Martha Burdis and myself in 2011 taught a class where we had 30 students in each class, but both the classes were basically comingled, and anyone who wanted to take the class, from around the world, could basically sign up. And, using feeds and RSS and a kind of mother blog, we could pull everything in.
What we found, which I think was for us the magic of the moment, was Twitter was an unbelievable networking tool to bring all the voices that were in that class in 2010-2011 together in a seamless space. And, it works very well, Mark, with your idea of past-present-future, because over the course of years of DS106, you'd have students who had taken it years ago giving feedback to students who are taking it now. That idea of a present, a past, and a future in a community is what makes it a community - otherwise it just dies, right? Because it happens for 15 weeks and then goes. But when people remain committed or interested or involved over the course of years, which we've seen with DS106, and it's a very small community in some ways, but it's a very active, and very overly committed I would say, community. It has really for me opened up the idea of, you know, there are ways to use these... I would say, unlike the more traditional stories that Joe, you kind of - and you did win the brand war - we were reacting to your digital storytelling because it was so prominent and it was so defined. In many ways, we're like, the story is not going to be very clear, going to be a minute and a half - in fact, it's going to be disjointed, across several media and it's going to be an ongoing kind of reflection point over time that doesn't end. It becomes the story of the learner and it's obviously branded or framed for our community, which is education, but also for the way in which the media itself was disaggregating. and was kind of becoming - Twitter kind of exemplified this very well - almost pointless, right? You didn't know where the idea was coming from, you didn't know where the beginning and the end of that conversation started, or where the beginning and the end of that story was. It was in many ways totally in media res - the whole thing was happening, as it happened. I was really interested in this disjointed nature of the story in social media and the web. And I think that's just one view because the thing that was cool about DS106 is Alan Levine taught it, Paul Bond taught it, Michael Branson Smith at the City University of New York taught it. Martha Burtis taught it. So many different people taught it in so many different ways that it didn't become an overarching kind of process. What did happen now that was consistent and fun is we started to bring in themes. DS106 as just a kind of capsule, right, and so you could fill it with what you wanted. You would maybe use a certain set of tools and talk about creating images or video or radio or audio or mashups - you name it, we had all these different things, kind of like a format. Whatever you wrote about had to be of interest to you, so it kind of relocated, like you did, Joe - the stories to the learner, and they would be the ones who were communicating back. Then we started doing things like the DS106 Zone where it was themed - we would watch DS106 Twilight Zone episodes together and then riff off them, and then we did that with The Wire. I bring this up as my last point because The Wire was super interesting to me. We watched 5 seasons of The Wire together over the course of a semester. Someone who since came to work with me - her father and I met each other, him not knowing that I was her professor doing her undergrad - she's like, he's like, "UMW, can you believe we paid a professor so that she could watch The Wire all semester?" And that was me. The idea here was that these students not only told stories about The Wire, remixed The Wire, they would create entire social profiles of characters on The Wire. BD Russell, who was the security guard at the Baltimore dock, basically had a Twitter account that one of my students created and was kind of acting out the role of BD Russell. Omar, who's a great figure in The Wire, had a LinkedIn account where you would go in and see the kind of narrative told about Omar as if he was putting up a LinkedIn account. I was super fascinated by this because I think my students were starting to realize that all of these different media are ways of telling their story. And it started to get kind of different when things like Instagram came around and Twitter was no longer valuable for an educational community. Things started to change in the class itself to re-evaluate some of its assumptions, but it was still embedded in the way in which our own identities were being fractured across these different platforms and how we kind of maintain that sense of consciousness in this new space. That was - I don't know if it's - I don't think it's a very good myth story because it's still filled with all sorts of uncertainty and whether it really happened or not. It's like The Big Bang, I guess - it's like, did that really happen? But that's the closest I can get to a coherent discussion of DS106.