Digital Storytelling

It all started when…

As part of an Educational Psychology course at Michigan State University I was asked to create the above video to describe why I am so fascinated with games and their applications to learning.  My first instinct was to point to the growing body of research that is demonstrating the efficacy of games in education, but I realized that the assignment was not about the research – instead it was about how I felt.  In examining my feelings about serious games, I realized that I was motivated by a frustration with educational inequities, and an aspiration to make the world a better place.

                In producing this video, technology played a significant role.  I started where I was most comfortable and wrote a short paper about my interest in serious games.  However, after writing that paper I wondered about which concepts I wanted the reader (or in this case viewer) to identify with.  In that process, I was forced to refine my ideas into a much less academic sounding product.  The medium in this case may not have been the message, but it certainly became a prism that forced a material change to the message.