Already my view of what a digital story is has changed since beginning this course. I originally viewed it as a way to represent a story to the masses. And while I still have this view, the view has also broadened. I never thought of a digital story as something that would have links to other places in it, as I always viewed it as sort of a documentary on the computer. And I never thought of it as something as simple as a slide show or a story with graphics like we saw explaining the controversy of merit system in teaching based on tests.
Perhaps it is simply a tool. And the user gets to define that tool. The educator will use it to teach his class something. The executive can use it to show her new initiatives to her employees. The artist can use it as an outlet of creativity. The historian can use it to tell about their research. As I am writing this, I am thinking about Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth and what he used in telling that story. He narrated his issue in front of an audience, showed excerpts of his life and how he got to that point and he uses a huge screen to show his data. Yes it is a documentary film but the method could easily be used in a digital story very effectively.
To me, it will always be first a way to convey a person’s story and the creativity behind it, to me, is art. And art should not be confined. But digital story telling is more than that as people try to define it, analyze it and produce it.