Making and sharing digital stories at TEC-CH

Every year at TEC-CH, for the Multichannel Communication Laboratory, students work with a web-based story authoring tool (1001stories) to create digital storytelling applications on a theme of their choice. Students work in groups following a suggested workflow made of: gathering textual contents, creating the editorial plan, writing the texts, selecting the images, recording the audio, uploading the media items online using the 1001stories tool, and doing a final quality check. The creation of the storytelling applications needs to respond to a predefined design format, made of a list of stories (first level of information) and sub-stories for each given story (second level of information).
Both the design format on which the stories are built, as well as the authoring workflow are seemingly rigid and yet, story authors may come with unexpected strikes of originality. This year students approached the authoring process creatively from step 1. One group used, for example, mind mapping as a way to brainstorm on the contents and gradually bring them towards an organized form. Several groups used interviewing experts as technique for contents elicitation – a technique we often use for creating professional storytelling applications in our laboratory (e.g. TEC-Lab storytelling works), but which is however time and resource-consuming and thus seldom used in educational settings by students.

I hope you will enjoy watching the narratives:

Corpo, automi, robot: a support for the exhibition by the same name, by Polo Culturale of Lugano, it gives an overview of the exhibition path and artworks, but also a view into the historical approaches to the human body and robotics, from an arts-based perspective. (In Italian)

Graffiti Pocket Gallery: a glimpse into Graffiti world, history, worldwide presence and significance, through a beautifully made narrative, using plenty of anecdotal evidence and a rich gallery of 222 pics.

The Ellora Caves: the presentation of the Ellora caves, an archeological site in the Indian state of Maharashtra, one of the largest rock-cut monastic sites in the world, place of worship for three religions – Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism.

Cremona & Violins: an incursion into the past and present of Cremona as city of music and violins, home for famous violin-makers as Stradivari and Amati. You can also learn how a violin is made in a typical liuteria cremonese.

11 Principles of KFPE: a helping tool for applicants to the KFPE funds (Commission for Research Partnerships with Developing Countries). These 11 principles for research in partnership between Switzerland and developing countries have been compiled from the KFPE documentation and retold in storytelling format.

(Photograph by Bia, the Multichannel Lab class)