A tale of 101 digital stories

Digital storytelling at Williams has become a standard part of how ITech introduces the use of video to faculty, staff, and students. From 2002 to the present, Williams College has invited Joe Lambert and others from the Center for Digital Storytelling [1] at least once a year to conduct three-day workshops for eight to twelve faculty and staff on digital storytelling. Participants create a three to five minute video from still images, audio narratives, music, and sometimes video. Though learning the technology necessary to create and edit the final videos is definitely part of the workshop, a greater emphasis is placed on the art of storytelling and script writing. The culminating event of the workshop is the movie showing at the end of the three days. The Office for Information Technology at Williams College has in turn used the Center for Digital Storytelling model of teaching digital storytelling to train students how to work with audio/video hardware; collect high quality audio, video, and still images; work with video editing and project management; and get to know each other in a new way. This paper covers the process of teaching digital storytelling and examines the outcomes from providing this training to the faculty, staff, and students of Williams College through interviews with past workshop participants.