Syllabus

Digital Storytelling | JMC 220a | Spring 2019 | Professor Laura Kelly

T/Th 17.45-19.05

American University in Bulgaria

Prerequisites: Writing for Media; Communication, Media & Society

NOTE: A Facebook group page that is closed to this class is a digital addition to this syllabus and this blog. On the Facebook page you will find links to resources, updates on meetings and deadlines. Our Facebook page will also serve as a publishing platform for the work created in this class. On our Facebook page we have created a Google Drive. Create a folder inside the drive with your name on it. Inside the folder you will create a Word document that is your reflection journal. You will be given assignments to respond to in the journal. 

Course Outline: Storytelling connects us to our humanity. It links us to our past and speaks to who we are in the present. Since humans first walked the earth, we have told stories. Through cave drawings and over fires, humans have told stories as a way to shape our existence. Storytellers learned early on that people like to hear stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end. We seem to be drawn to stories that have characters that look like us–or at least share characteristics we can relate to. Many of us enjoy being moved by a story, either emotionally, or viscerally, like in a good action film or in a gripping book.

Digital Storytelling is a journalism course that uses digital tools to tell journalistic stories in a compelling and engaging way. For this course we will be mapping the community of Blagoevgrad. Traditional mapping involves cartography; this course will use storytelling to show the contours, characters, history and resources in the city of Blagoevgrad. This means that all of the stories you create for the course will be about some aspect of Blagoevgrad. Think of this as a giant group project even though your work will be done solo, in pairs and in small groups. When all the stories are compiled, they have the cumulative effect of showing the city as seen through your eyes. We are showing the city as we see it.

The format is hands-on, interactive, and project-based. You will be using image, text and sound. We will decide as a group and as individuals what stories we will work on, how and with whom. You will create individual and team projects. We will want to make clear what constitutes a fair, equitable and substantive division of labor among team members. We will devote a portion of class time to editorial meetings in which we decide how to proceed and help one another sort out any challenges that arise.

This is not a course that will teach you new multimedia software skills that you will then use to tell stories. It is the opposite. As a group we will think about how to harness our collective toolkit to select the best tools to tell your stories. We will have app labs where we test new software and share our recommendations. But the heart of this course is developing your ability to recognize story, do the work to collect it and then to select the optimal way to tell it. The tools don’t dictate the work; the work dictates the tools.

You will be held to high journalistic standards, which means that stories must be accurate, relevant, compelling and created within the bounds of professional ethics. Interactive also means that I, your editor, will be contributing to your work during the process as will your classmates. Stories will be okayed by me. Drafts will be read and shared. Critique sessions will allow the projects to get feedback during the process.

Grades: There is no final exam in this course. There are no tests. This is a project-based course with writing and storytelling at its heart. You will be assigned 4 projects during the semester and possibly 1-2 smaller, pop-up assignments. Each assignment is assigned a rubric. The pop-up assignments will be studies, that is smaller assignments that contribute to a skill or an understanding of one of the larger projects. Successful execution of the pop-ups will contribute to the grade of the larger assignment it is related to. 

The four assignments will be given deadlines of varying lengths (from one week to a month). For the first three assignments you will be given the chance to rework your project to incorporate feedback before final evaluation. The final assignment will be evaluated without a draft process.

You will also create a reflection journal. You will be given reading/viewing assignments for the journal with deadlines. Your reflection journal grade will reflect your ability to meet assigned deadlines, the answer the questions fully and to write answers to questions that indicate deep reading, thought and analysis. Grammar, spelling and punctuation are also taken into account.

The final grades for the projects include your drafts, your pop-up assignments (if any). your ability to meet deadlines, your communication with your editor, and your final product. Grades reflect your ability to integrate and practice what you have learned in class lecture, what you have assimilated from the notes and feedback about your ongoing projects, what you have absorbed from the examples, readings, viewings and other resources assigned and available to you during the semester.

The Breakdown:

10 percent–reflection journal

30 percent–final project

20 percent each–projects 1, 2 & 3

Attendance: Attendance is mandatory and influences your grade. Why? Because class is where discussions take place, where ideas are generated, where the group participates in shared learning. Also: All of your work will be presented to the class. Sometimes there may be outside people in class when you present your work. Your work will be critiqued and you will participate in group feedback and critique.

Deadlines: For your work to be given full consideration to earn its highest mark, deadlines are absolute unless you have received prior permission from Professor Kelly. Why? In this course we will attempt to mirror a professional atmosphere. When you work in media, you are expected to meet deadlines. Each project has several deadlines. There is the final deadline, of course, but the creation of each project will also have deadlines for pitching ideas, for drafts, for completion of larger aspects of your projects. Your ability to meet all the deadlines within a project contribute to your overall grade for the project and for the course.

Academic Honesty and Professional Integrity: You are expected to be familiar with and adhere to AUBG’s policies as written in the Student Handbook. Violating university policies means you will be subject to the consequences outlined in the handbook. These may include failing the course or being expelled from the course or the university. If you plagiarize or fabricate material for this course, you will receive an F.

A media professional builds his/her reputation on the quality of his/her work. Much of that reputation relies on trust: the trust of colleagues, sources, editors and the public. Plagiarism, which is using the work or ideas of another and calling those your own and not giving the proper credit, source or citation, is a very serious breach of trust in the media profession. Understand that plagiarizing in a media writing course means that you are passing off the work of another to a large audience. You are essentially telling your viewers, listeners and readers that the work you are presenting to them is yours. Be sure that is indeed the case. This does not mean that you will not be using the information, opinion, knowledge and data of others. Writing for media means that we gather multiple sources of information. Our obligation as media practitioners is that we tell our audience where we got our information so that they might evaluate its relevance, point of view and trustworthiness.

This syllabus is subject to change.