Teaching Digital Humanities in Romania

In their article Teaching Digital Humanities in Romania Mădălina Nicolaescu and Adriana Mihai describe a research project that sets out to promote digital humanities with an internet based platform in Shakespeare studies at the University of Bucharest. Texts have been collected and catalogued and the platform\u27s technical construction is in construction. Based on the Shakespeare platform\u27s content and presentation, Nicolaescu and Mihai propose participation strategies for involvement in the creation of a digital database that is both a research tool and a digital storytelling environment. The database is a collection of digitized translations of Shakespeare in Romanian followed by participants\u27 input in the form of critical and creative work which allows users to interact in the platform, expand its metadata, and produce multilinear narratives of interpretation

Interactive Storytelling: Opportunities for Online Course Design

Compelling interactive stories can be used to get and keep learners’ interest in online courses. Interactive storytelling presents information in a manner that involves learners by allowing them to connect with the content. Incorporating interactive storytelling into online education offers the potential to increase student interest and knowledge retention. Interactive storytelling also allows learners to create a personalized experience. By analyzing examples of interactive stories, we identified five features of interactive storytelling: dynamic presentation, data visualization, multisensory media, interactivity, and narration. We explain each feature, and its educational benefits, with illustrations provided from five interactive storytelling examples. We also discuss the implications of interactive storytelling for online course design

Smart glasses for 3D multimodal composition

Extended reality technologies – mixed, augmented, and virtual reality, and future-related technologies – are rapidly expanding in many fields, with underexplored potentials for multimodal composition in digital media environments. This research generates new knowledge about the novel wearable technology – smart glasses – to support elementary students’ multimodal story authoring with 3D virtual objects or holograms. The researchers and teachers implemented learning experiences with upper elementary students from three classrooms to compose and illustrate written narratives before retelling the story with Microsoft HoloLens 2 smart glasses, selecting 3D holograms to illustrate the settings, characters, and events from the 3D Viewer software. The findings analyse how smart glasses supported students’ multimodal composition, and relatedly, the new modal resources available to students wearing smart glasses to compose 3D stories. The findings have significance for educators and researchers to understand and utilise the multimodal affordances of augmented and mixed reality environments for composing and storytelling

Metadiscourse analysis of digital interpersonal interactions in academic settings in Turkey

Rapid technological advances, efficiency and easy access have firmly established emailing as a vital medium of communication in the last decades. Nowadays, all around the world, particularly in educational settings, the medium is one of the most widely used modes of interaction between students and university lecturers. Despite their important role in academic life, very little is known about the metadiscursive characteristics of these e-messages and as far as the author is aware there is no study that has examined metadiscourse in request emails in Turkish. This study aims to contribute to filling in this gap by focusing on the following two research questions: (i) How many and what type of interpersonal metadiscourse markers are used in request emails sent by students to their lecturers? (ii) Where are they placed and how are they combined with other elements in the text? In order to answer these questions a corpus of unsolicited request e-mails in Turkish was compiled. The data collection started in January 2010 and continued until March 2018. A total of 353 request emails sent from university students to their lecturers were collected. The data were first transcribed in CLAN CHILDES format and analysed using the interpersonal model. The metadiscourse categories that aimed to involve readers in the email were identified and classified. Next, their places in the text were determined and described in detail. Findings of the study show that request emails include a wide array of multifunctional interpersonal metadiscourse markers which are intricately combined and employed by the writers to reach their aims. The results also showed that there is a close relation between the “weight of the request” and number of the interpersonal metadiscourse markers in request mails

The Effect of Rule-Based Scaffoldings on Second Grade Students\u27 Digital Storytelling

Digital storytelling is a powerful method for revitalizing literacy instruction. Past research suggested that digital storytelling activities improve students’ writing skills through construction of various types of stories. However, little research has investigated in what ways educators can promote students’ interests and actual abilities to express narrative discourse in a digital format. Recent research indicated that the use of story grammars help students develop sophisticated stories. From this perspective, Labov’s story grammar emphasized two functions of good story structure: reference—the listeners (or readers) are told what happened, and evaluation—the speakers (or writers) reveal their attitude toward the events of the narrative. Meanwhile, current practitioner based research suggests that Lambert’s seven elements approach of digital storytelling emerged as a practical guideline for creating effective digital stories in elementary classrooms. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate the potential of three instructional approaches: Labov’s story grammar only, Lambert’s seven elements only, and both instructional approaches, as scaffolding(s) for students’ digital storytelling. Specifically, a quantitative research design with three experimental groups and one control group, pre-test and post-test, was employed. Participants included 104 second-graders (largely from high socioeconomic status families), with 26 in each of four classrooms. Therefore, the three instructional scaffold approaches and one non-scaffold supported approach were randomly assigned to each of four classrooms respectively to support students’ story writing, storytelling, story design and construction using Movie Maker software. Students’ understanding of narrative writing was assessed before and after the implementation of the intervention. The results indicated that the instructional scaffolding positively enhanced students’ performance in story writing, storytelling, as well as verbal and visual expression. In particular, the story grammar scaffolding motivated students to produce coherent, more sophisticated stories. The seven elements scaffolding sparked students’ creative verbal and visual expressions and stimulated them to elaborate using a variety of adjectives in their digital stories. When both scaffolding approaches were implemented, students significantly outperformed the other groups on the quality of story content, story coherency and narrative knowledge. The implications of these findings and recommendations for future research are discussed

Digital storytelling as a didactic sequence for promoting the speaking skill in 10th graders for a public school

This writing paper aimed at designing a didactic sequence using digital storytelling in a foreign language classroom which focused on the development of the speaking skill in media education. This didactic sequence used qualitative research which sought for the study of the participants in their environment. The targeted population for this project is secondary education students which will be involved in a series of workshops for the creation of virtual narrative stories in their foreign language. This didactic sequence has as the main objectives, in the first hand that students will be able to tell a virtual narrative story in English and on the other to be a model for future teachers to integrate technology in language teaching. The results expected after the design of this didactic sequence will be that students gain knowledge in the creation of this text typology which is narrative stories and the strengthening of the speaking skills to achieve a higher level of English proficiencyEste trabajo de grado tuvo como objetivo diseñar una secuencia didáctica utilizando la narración digital en un aula de clase de lengua extranjera que se centró en el desarrollo de la habilidad oral en educación media. Esta secuencia didáctica utilizó investigación cualitativa que buscaba el estudio de los participantes en su entorno. La población objetivo de este proyecto son los estudiantes de educación secundaria que participarán en una serie de talleres para la creación de historias narrativas digitales en su lengua extranjera. Esta secuencia didáctica tiene como principales objetivos, por un lado, que los estudiantes puedan contar historias narrativas digitales en inglés y por otro ser un modelo para que futuros profesores integren tecnología en la enseñanza de una lengua extranjera. Los resultados esperados luego del diseño de esta secuencia didáctica serán que los estudiantes adquieran conocimiento sobre la creación de esta tipología textual que son narrativas digitales y el fortalecimiento de las habilidades del habla para lograr un mayor nivel de proficiencia en inglés.PregradoLicenciado(a) en Bilingüismo con Énfasis en InglésContent Content .................................................................................................................................1 Abstract.................................................................................................................................3 Resumen ...............................................................................................................................4 Justification...........................................................................................................................5 Teaching objectives........................................................................................................12 Learning objectives ........................................................................................................12 Theoretical Framework ......................................................................................................14 Literature Review ...........................................................................................................14 Conceptual Framework ..................................................................................................20 Digital storytelling......................................................................................................21 Methodology.......................................................................................................................38 Type of Project ...............................................................................................................38 Type of Study .................................................................................................................38 Instructional Design........................................................................................................39 Planning Phase................................................................................................................39 Execution phase..............................................................................................................39 Evaluation phase.............................................................................................................39 Ethical considerations.........................................................................................................60 Conclusion and discussion .................................................................................................6

Microworld Writing: Making Spaces for Collaboration, Construction, Creativity, and Community in the Composition Classroom

In order to create a 21st century pedagogy of learning experiences that inspire the engaged, constructive, dynamic, and empowering modes of work we see in online creative communities, we need to focus on the platforms, the environments, the microworlds that host, hold, and constitute the work. A good platform can build connections between users, allowing for the creation of a community, giving creative work an engaged and active audience. These platforms will work together to build networks of rhetorical/creative possibilities, wherein students can learn to cultivate their voices, skills, and knowledge bases as they engage across platforms and genres. I call on others to make, mod, or hack other new platforms. In applying this argument to my subject, teaching writing in a college composition class, I describe Microworld Writing as a genre that combines literary language practice with creativity, performativity, play, game mechanics, and coding. The MOO can be an example of one of these platforms and of microworld writing, in that it allows for creativity, user agency, and programmability, if it can be updated to have the needed features (virtual world, community, accessibility, narrativity, compatibility and exportability). I offer the concept of this MOO-IF as inspiration for a collaborative, community-oriented Interactive Fiction platform, and encourage people to extend, find, and build their own platforms. Until then and in addition, students can be brought into Microworld Writing in the composition classroom through interactive-fiction platforms, as part of an ecology of genre experimentation and platform exercise