As human beings, were are very used to storytelling, and most of us just love stories. Stories makes us to remember and understand many things better, stories feed our imagination, and makes us to dream. By listening to the stories we can experience a lot of different emotions, and the stories may make us feel safe and comfortable.
I love stories. I love to write them, as well as listen to them. That’s why I took this Digital Storytelling assignment as part of Psychology in Human-Tech Interaction course two years back. Shortly, in this assignment each student creates a short video, a digital story, about one of the most meaningful topics that they have learned during the course. They can connect the learned topic to some personal perspective, experience or something that would be useful for their future life. The last year’s stories can be found here: Digital Storytelling – A Pedagogical Method to Present the Course Learnings for Life <3 | Computing Sciences | Tampere Universities (tuni.fi)
As a teacher, I need to admit that sometimes reviewing and grading long course reports is a bit challenging, as you need to keep the concentration and read very carefully, but watching the stories that students have made always makes me into happy mood, and my concentration is working perfectly, because the stories are so interesting, personal and lovely. Also, especially in remote teaching, these stories provide me a small window for the students’ world, which I might otherwise miss. Through the stories I get to know the students a bit better, and I have a chance to see how they perceive a small part of the world, how do they think, what insights they have gotten, and I can hear the students’ voice. Based on the feedback concerning this assignment, I think that most of the students like this task because it will give them an opportunity to express themselves in a little bit different way than in the course report 🙂
I am publishing here some of the stories from this year’s course with the permission of the students. It was hard to select the stories here, because all of them were so good. Enjoy the stories!
In this story, Vrinda describes the relationship between emotions and creativity, in her lovely illustrated story:
Here is Roni’s story about motivation with very good sense of humor:
In this beautiful story, Sara is talking about the importance of emotions, and how we can express emotions in digital channels:
Check also Niina’s very creative production of schemas, communication and group work: Niina’s Digital Story.
Here you can find Tooba’s story about the learnings about emotions and what they matter in UX design: Tooba’s Digital Story.
Last but not least, this story is from Pietari, and he describes the value of Mural canvas in workshop activity: Pietari’s story.
Hopefully you enjoyed the stories, I already had a grand movie night when watching these 79 wonderful stories 🙂
Written by Aino Ahtinen, University Lecturer in HTI
