Digital Storytelling

This course focuses on the process of creative writing for digital media, with instruction in creating immersive and multilinear stories, dialogue, and characters specifically for digital environments.

The course will explore interactivity, choice, games, and the immersive in VR/AR/XR, social media, cyber theatre, video platforms, and other emerging spaces for digital storytelling.

To inspire and inform engagement with the creative process, the course will survey the historical contexts of digital storytelling and examine the roots of digital storytelling concepts, as well as deeply engage with educational applications, experimental work, representation, and equity.

Students' work with digital storytelling will be developed in a workshop environment; verbal participation and collaboration are essential to this course.

Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of the course, students will be able to: 

• Identify techniques common to digital storytelling such as its approach to interactivity, character development, dialogue, narrative, and story-structure; 

• Navigate and identify platforms for digital storytelling including, but not limited to, video games, hypertexts, cyber theatre, social media, VR/AR/XR, online audio and video; 

• Create original work for digital platforms, while also learning how to avoid imitation or cliché; 

• Understand how digital storytelling engages with historical precedents, education, and equity;

• Understand and reflect upon how professional creators solve common technical problems of craft and form in digital environments;

• Communicate useful, supportive feedback to peers in a creative writing workshop; 

• Demonstrate an understanding of revision as essential to the writing process;

• Evaluate suggestions from an instructor and peers, applying those suggestions to revisions.