Singapore has ambitions to become a global hub for `digital economy’ services ranging from e-commerce and the Internet to media, entertainment and specialist publishing. In September 2008, Singapore’s National Library Board, National Book Development Council and The Arts House are hosting the inaugural Asian Digital Storytelling Congress, Beyond Words 2008. 

Storytelling and the oral tradition have been powerful vehicles for passing on knowledge, beliefs, traditions and history through the generations. Today, with advances in technology, storytelling has taken on new forms. Digital storytelling, for example, is a media-rich format that combines narrative with audio and visual effects.  

“Digital storytelling brings together traditional storytelling and modern multimedia tools to deliver tales using images, sound, music and voice. It brings out the artist, the storyteller and the writer in everyone,” says R. Ramachandran, executive director of the National Book Council. According to him, digital stories are emerging as tools in a variety of settings. “They are increasingly used to entertain, teach, train, inform, promote and advertise. Corporations and public institutions use digital storytelling to motivate their human capital, create a legacy of corporate stories, and impart core values.”

One of the speakers at the congress is Themin Suwardy, accountancy professor and associate dean (curriculum and teaching), Singapore Management University. Suwardy is a recognised champion of using IT in the classroom. In 2004 he was awarded the Hewlett-Packard Mobile Technology for Teaching Grant Initiative, and in 2006 the SMU Most Innovative Teacher Award. Suwardy uses digital stories as a supplementary resource to teach introductory accounting to undergraduates. Students gain a perspective on how accounting theories can work in a real life business context.

Teaching Accounting in Three Dimensions

For Suwardy, digital storytelling is one pedagogical tool in his three dimensional approach which comprises theories, cases and stories. “Theories are what students learn in textbooks which are the methodological, structured and systematic study of a discipline. Cases are examples of how the theories are applied in the business world, but cases tend to support the sequence in which the theories are taught, which is often inconsistent with how businesses are operated,” he elaborates.

Stories, as the third element in his pedagogical approach, help to connect the other two elements in a meaningful way and make up for what is lacking through theories and cases. “Stories provide the contextual, real life scenarios; they give students perspectives on how things may work in real life in the right sequence!”

Take the digital story, Movies-Door-2-Door.Com, that Suwardy uses in his course. In this multimedia adaptation of a book by Mark S. Beasley and Frank A. Buckless (2002), three young graduates come together to start a movie rental business. The characters play out the “logical order of an entrepreneurial endeavour”. They conduct market research, formulate a business plan, consider the different ways in which they can finance the business, and set up their business. Along the way, they figure out for themselves (rather than being taught) how accounting information is essential in making business decisions.

Thus the sequence of topics does not follow that of a typical accounting course but instead reflects reality. Movies-Door-2-Door is constructed using still images combined with narration and interactive features. Suwardy also uses SMU students and locations in the production of the digital story.

He emphasises that digital stories are not meant to teach the technical aspects of accounting, such as how to set up an account, do bank reconciliation or depreciate long-term assets. These are taught in the theoretical component of the course, supplemented with cases. Instead, stories show students why these procedures are needed in a business operation. Thus, “stories allow students to experience the context of the things we teach in class,” he says.

Digital Storytelling as Pedagogy

What makes digital storytelling an effective pedagogical tool, he believes, is that it provides a unique platform through which educators can connect with and engage students, fundamentals for a unique experiential learning experience. A digital story can engage students’ visual and auditory senses in a way that written words alone cannot.    

“I think a common challenge for many educators is motivating students. If you don’t have connection and engagement, you can’t motivate them,” says Suwardy. He has found that a digital story is one good way of motivating students. In this instance, it has helped generated a large amount of feedback and responses from the students.

In a survey conducted by the University’s Center for Teaching and Learning in 2005 -- when the digital story was first used as pedagogy -- 72% of the total of 46 respondents said that the digital story had helped to enhance their understanding of financial accounting. In addition, 69% of respondents agreed that the digital story encouraged them to reflect on the subject matter, while 61% said that it aided the retention of accounting concepts they learnt.

Perhaps even more significant is the fact that, to successfully engage students brought up on a regular diet of digital technologies and the Internet, multimedia platforms such as digital storytelling could increasingly become the norm rather than the exception in institutes of higher learning. Another advantage of digital storytelling as a pedagogical tool is the opportunity for educators and academics to reach out to a larger group of students, and to offer students greater control over the mode and manner through which the contents of the story are accessed and absorbed. Students can watch the digital story at any time, anywhere before they get to class.

Making Digital Storytelling an Effective Tool

However, having a digital story alone is not enough to make digital storytelling an effective teaching tool. Suwardy points out the other ingredients that are needed. For example, some educators might incorporate digital stories into their teaching, but take a more passive approach where there are little or no follow up activities linked to the stories. In such instances, students are usually less engaged and interested; there would be little recollection of what they had watched or were supposed to have learnt.

For Suwardy, what has been useful for him in obtaining strong participation from students was the follow-up activities of both online and classroom discussions. “I have tried many approaches, class discussions, online discussions, and everything else in between. For example, in the most recent round, after the students watched each episode, they each got a random question they needed to answer, and had to be prepared to argue their points in class”.

“If you don’t take a proactive role and make it an integral part of the overall learning experience, the value of digital storytelling would be diminished,” says Suwardy. “Even if you have a great story, it needs reinforcement. Just like advertisements, the successful ones are usually done as a series and not a one-off thing.” In other words, whether the objective is to sell a product or teach a lesson, some sort of reinforcement is needed to get the message ingrained in people’s minds.

Suspense is another important ingredient. Instead of letting students watch the whole story in one sitting, the story is broken up into 12 episodes, with one being released each week, just as in a TV serial. Students do not know what will unfold in the next episode. “This is important because in real life you cannot make a decision, and click a  fast forward button to see the impact of your decision,” explains Suwardy. This, together with a realistic storyline that they could identify with, had many students soon hooked and looking forward to each week’s new episode.

Suwardy thinks that digital storytelling can be especially effective for teaching values, ethics or moral lessons. “If you think about how to teach ethics, or what is legal or not legal, how do we give people a glimpse of making decisions that have an impact on other people’s lives? One needs to be in that position -- or at least experience the circumstances -- to understand why a decision is made, or what is a good decision or a bad one.

“You can say ‘don’t cheat, don’t steal, don’t hide your accounting losses’ and so on, but in terms of teaching the context and decision-making process, nothing is better than stories. Without the context, all we have are the theories of law, of what is legal and not legal, what is allowed or not allowed,” he emphasises. “We can look at cases such as Barings Bank, Enron, WorldCom, but will that help students make decisions at crunch time? I think digital stories can provide students that experiential exposure of what is it like making those decisions in the real world outside. We need to do more of that.”

Storytelling in the Corporate World

Storytelling has also been generating much buzz in the corporate world. Suwardy observes that storytelling has been used more successfully for marketing and branding purposes, but with more mixed results where teaching corporate values, principles and other intrinsic notions are concerned. He suggests that, to make digital storytelling an effective staff communication and training tool in the corporate setting, companies should first think about what would move the employees and how best to engage and connect with the employees, or risk having the stories fall flat.

For example, in some companies, the staff orientation programme may include a corporate video that tells the story of the company’s history or what the founder did, but that is probably the least effective way of creating a sense of belonging and evoking excitement among the new staff about joining the company.

“Without an engaging storyline that speaks to the targeted audience, digital storytelling would not work”, comments Suwardy. “What’s more, with an interesting storyline, the company can build a series of stories on it. But the series should not be segmented, one-off events. Instead, they should be part of an active, continuous corporate programme with an overriding theme weaving through every component.

Sample episodes of Suwardy’s digital story are available at www.research.smu.edu.sg/faculty/MD2D/