Examples, examples, examples….

I’m getting ready to start team-teaching a new online course which focuses on Gospel and global media cultures (although, frankly, we’re mostly working with US culture). One of the requirements of the course is for people to create a short digital story of some sort. I’m going to try collecting examples here in my blog that are good examples of what I’m looking for, but also some that are less adequate.

For instance, here is an example that’s less adequate, in my judgment, because all it does is pair a song that has explicit religious language with images that didactically illustrate the words from the song.

I believe digital stories need to have layers to them, and the layers should open up meaning and make it more multiple and complex, rather than closing it down. I suppose you could argue that Sufjan Stevens’ song adds at least one additional layer to the meaning of the images, but mostly it seems to me that the images seek to illustrate the music rather than make it more open to diverse interpretation.