What is a story? What is storytelling? What is digital storytelling? Week 3 of DS106 Headless 13 has us asking these questions and exploring this for ourselves.

What do you associate with the word storytelling? Before you do anything this week, use this as an opportunity to put down in words what your current concept is. There is no right or wrong answer here- this is to set up your current concept of what story means.

Do not go look anything up online — We are looking for your ideas. Just write a blog post to represent a starting point to outline what storytelling means to you.

Wanting to understand and become a better digital storyteller is what attracted me to DS106 in the first place, so I’ve been doing some serious pondering all week.  And being challenged to NOT read anything about it before writing up my reflections has definitely been a challenge. I want to “get it right”, quote my sources, rely on the words and thoughts of others to form “my” thoughts and opinions. It’s hard for me to wing it like this.  But my DS106 participation (now winding its way through my private AND professional lives in a big way) continues to reinforce it is through taking risks and allowing myself to be appropriately vulnerable that I stretch my boundaries thereby allowing real learning to take place. I am not just learning new tools and techniques, but learning who I am and what I’m capable of.

So what is a story? And I’m supposed to do this with words only? But images are integral to a story, right?! Yes, images are integral. But they don’t have to be something seen with the physical eye.  Images formed in your minds eye are just as important if not more so. And visual images themselves won’t necessarily a story make.

In my professional life as a strategic business/technology analyst at 3M I am often presented with a great deal of data and information that needs to be communicated to a variety of audiences with different levels of interest and familiarity with the subject matter. Sharing the raw data, as it were, would almost certainly be a waste of time for everyone. It’s my job to “COMMUNICATE” that information, not just gather it and spit it back out again. I am paid to be a curator of information AND a storyteller. It is the story I create and tell that is based upon that data and information that is the key. Even the media I use to tell the story has an impact on the effectiveness of communicating the information. With a global asynchronous audience I can’t rely on personally sharing the story in real-time with a live person in attendance who is engaged in the moment, that can ask questions, get clarification, etc. Mastering the art of DIGITAL storytelling is a must for me.

Storytelling is usually associated with entertainment.  But you are still communicating. It’s not just a bunch of random words, images, or sounds strung together. They are brought together in a way that creates meaning for the creator and the audience- whether it be to entertain, relay information, or my preference, both.  A good story take us on a journey. We are engaged.  We are impacted by its telling.  A story has meaning to our lives.