Multi-modal Final

Stories for Change

Service Learning 2

The day I worked at the Restore I started out moving chairs around and cleaning some cabinets that had been brought there. After that I then washed a car that had been brought the day before, this took a long time. After that the rest of the day was spent helping unload items being donated. People brought all kinds of stuff, some brought books and similar small items, others brought large furniture, old appliances and similar things which required several people to unload. Overall it was a long day but everyone there was nice and it was a fun experience overall, I might go again after things clear up.

Service Learning Post 1

My volunteering hours were spent at Habitat For Humanity’s Restore. It is is a thrift store they run where items are sold to financially support their work building houses for low income families. Volunteers are necessary to help process items being brought in, to move large thing like furniture, clean the building, etc.

Digital Story Composition Reflection

Composing this digital story presented a peculiar challenge to me on two fronts. 1. I find it hard to talk about myself and I have had relatively privileged life so finding a topic was difficult. 2. I am technologically illiterate so editing was a very new experience. In the end, I think the overall composition turned out well. The issues I felt present in the final version are that the audio quality is not as good as I would have liked it to be in certain sections and I would prefered to have more personal photos, though I found the topic was not very amicable to that.

Digital Story

*The drawing of Hamlet was done by me when the story takes place and is a personal photo.

I have contacted multiple agencies to find out what they are looking for and have only gotten one response yet. My goal is to be able to help those in need in the community. I also want to be able to better understand the perspectives and experiences of people in our community who we often do not listen too. My concerns are mainly with finding an agency that will work well with my schedule and hopefully finding work where I can actually be impactful. I also want to make sure it is work that I can do well, as I am not very experienced in most types of labor. Overall, I am excited though to figure out what I am going to do and start working on it.

Chapter 8 in Digital Storytelling by Joe Lambert which is entitled, "Approaches to the Scripting Process" feels like an excellent short introduction to drafting a digital story. I especially like what Lambert says about writing prompts and that he lists some examples. Prompts are a good way to just get straight into writing which he explains is much better than sitting at a blank page for hours.

Lambert says that, "Good writing has a destination and seeks the shortest path to the destination, but no shorter." At first I wasn't a fan of this as I feel like the journey of a story, not just the end is important, and a story and can still have done something well even if it's conclusion is unsatisfactory, but upon further reflection I realized that everything accomplished on the journey is part of the destination, every world or image of a story is part of the destination in itself no matter its placement in the story  chronologically (if the story is told is told properly) and the overall destination is supposed to be the harmony of all these accomplishments.

My story

My story is about how I came to love literature through first reading Shakespeare which helped me feel understood and opened the door to me finding more understanding of myself and new ways of understanding different people’s stories and world-views through literature. This profoundly changed how I see the world and has also helped me to deal with mental illness. I think this story can be relevant to others because it might help them see how stories can help them connect with a larger world, stories are how we connect and share ourselves and others share themselves with us in ways that transcend physical interactions. Overall my goal with telling this story is to help people understand that stories are more than entertainment but will shape who they are and how they understand the world.