Critical perspectives on personal digital narratives

With ICT for learning now embedded in Australian state and nationalcurriculum policy, multiliteracies open spaces for affordances of visual, spatialelements of texts to enrich and modify word meanings (New London Group, 1996;Kress, 1997). Moreover, the Web 2.0 environment offers authors enhanced spaces forcollaboration and production. However, in schools, many digital practices remainlargely unchanged since power point and internet research were considered new. Anobvious place to initiate pedagogical change in schools is in preservice education,where students, often comfortable with media technologies, are forming beginnerteacher identities. This study explores a curriculum initiative that seeks to harness thepotential of the digital to mediate personal stories within a preservice educationprogram. Students were asked to create a traditional written introduction, followed bya digital self-presentation. A critical reflection was then designed to encourageunderstanding of how mode, purpose and audience shaped students’ selfrepresentations.In this small study, reflections were analysed to understand how farpersonal narratives allowed authors to explore the affordances of digital technology andpush print text convention boundaries. The study found that in these cases, the role ofthe teacher was pivotal to exploring digital potential