A GENRE THEORY PERSPECTIVE ON DIGITAL ... - ETD

workshop model of activities) to facilitate the learning of the crafts and arts of digital
storytelling. For other interested parties, such as teachers who intend to introduce digital
storytelling into their classrooms, similar conceptual, practical, and material concerns the
DUSTY designers had faced often resurface. Therefore, the clubhouse way may provide a ready
framework to orient one towards an effective way of organizing a digital storytelling program.
When repeatedly drawn upon, the clubhouse way becomes the clubhouse model. In turn, the
discursive, material, and practical structures of the clubhouse model sediment and stabilize,
ultimately shaping how we think about digital storytelling and mediating ongoing digital
storytelling experiences.
Why digital storytelling?
In the previous section, I have touched upon several issues central to my thinking about
digital storytelling as an exemplary “case” of new cultural practices. We observe in digital
storytelling certain formal as well as epistemological “properties” that are markedly new and
common among the range of new cultural practices. Most notable among these properties are the
use of multimodal resources and creative remix of multiple cultural genres, the use of new
technological and digital tools, the manifestation of new “ethos stuff” of our post-industrial
reality through a dynamic fusion of formal, epistemological, ideological, and practical features
(Lankshear & Knobel, 2007), and the gradual evolution of the cultural practice into institutional
forms with embedded discursive, material, and practical structures to inform and orient ongoing
work across different social institutions and for different purposes. When considered as a whole,
these dimensions constitute an adequate condition for distinguishing a cultural practice from
others.
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