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Kay Miller

IT 5340 Digital Storytelling

Design Document

Competency #4

Purpose

My digital story was originally designed to be part of a larger unit called Finance Basics for

New Biomedical Laboratory Managers and Primary Investigators. The unit would be composed of five

lessons, which are intended to give the learner an overview of ways to obtain funding, use grant money,

get out of debt if one happens to go over budget, and maintain a positive balance for grant accounts.

The digital story is intended to serve as an overview for the entire unit. The story does not contain all of

the details about the hows pertaining to obtaining and using funding; it focuses mainly on the whys

the emotional impact of starting a new lab and risks to a new career due to poor planning and poor use

of resources.

Design Decisions

Little diversity in learning ability is anticipated among audience members. In order to achieve a

position that would lead up to this instruction, participants would have to be driven, well educated, and

experienced in their fields. However, there may be audience members for whom English is a second,

third, or even fourth language. To accommodate this, the language used for instruction is not loaded

with nuance such as jargon or idiomatic expressions1. Clarity and straightforward presentation is

essential to ensure that all audience members understand. However, the language is not simplified so

much that it insults the audience's intelligence or speaks down to them.

The digital story was designed to look casual, and the style of narration is conversational. When

delivering the narration, I tried to adopt a tone similar to some professional scientists that I know. I

want the story to feel as if someone is saying I'm one of you, and here's what happened to me.

I used as many photographs of real scientists and laboratories as I could find to fit the story. The

1 6/3/2011: In retrospect, I realize that the title of the digital story, Keeping My Head Above Water, contains an

idiomatic expression, and would need to be changed prior to implementation. The phrase is not used in the story itself,

however, and it would be avoided in any accompanying lesson.

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audience will comprise researchers and laboratory managers, and a fake looking laboratory will

damage the story's credibility. I also tried to reflect the diversity of the scientific community by using

images of women and people of color when such images could be found. Interestingly, I found more

than enough pictures of women in science, but struggled to find pictures of men.

The music at the beginning is cheerful to reflect the excitement of the narrator upon getting her

position as full professor. When her laboratory's finances take a downturn, the music begins to build

tension to reflect the stressfulness of the event. Debt is very stressful in any situation, and the narrator's

stress is intensified by the possibility of her career and research being brought to an early demise. At

the end, the cheerful music returns to reflect the narrator's improved state of mind her lab is doing

well and she is succeeding just as she had hoped when she was first hired. The song used at the

beginning and end does build some tension in toward the middle, but for the section that deals with the

audit and the imposed restrictions on the research, I wanted music that would lend itself to even more

tension and sense of loss. I found music that I think matched the mood of the middle section, and I used

synthetic stringed instruments in GarageBand to smooth the transitions from one song to the other.

The transitions in both the music and the visuals were kept simple to avoid distracting the

audience from the story. I used few visual effects aside from titles and citations; the only other effects

were the fades on the first and last images that smooth the transition from title to story and from story

to credits.

Considerations for Implementation

The story is appropriate for my audience because I feel that it addresses many of the issues that

are of importance to biomedical researchers: budget shortfalls (which are extremely common as the

cost of research outpaces the amount of money that is distributed each year in grants), the spirit of

teamwork among researchers, and the sense of responsibility that primary investigators feel toward

their research assistants. I touch on the fact that the research is important, both to the researcher and to

the public, without inflating the importance of the research until the situation no longer seems credible.

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The Office of Employee Learning and Development (ELD) at the University of Colorado

already has a course on laboratory finance, and it is unlikely that the unit that I developed for this

digital story will come to replace or supplement the existing course, however, ELD is looking for ways

to incorporate multimedia into online courses, and this digital story has been used to demonstrate how

our videos might look.