Storytelling by Students

Abstract

In the project “Storytelling by Students”, future first-year students are networked with students in order to make it easier for first-year students to find their way around the world of higher education. In the processs, Students talk about their experiences in choosing a course of study and their first study impressions.  The exchange takes place on the “Storytelling by Students” platform. This is a student-designed digital and participatory platform that enables students to share their knowledge with upcoming students. According to their interests and realities, students produce multimedia content themselves to interact and share experiences with other students. The “Storytelling by Students” platform is not just a collection of information, but a living, growing interplay of content that is continuously filled by students in a self-organized way. The project is the result of a cross-university initiative, which results from the cooperation of students of the FH Campus Wien, the FH Technikum Wien and the TU Wien.

Outcome Summary

In the Storytelling by Students project, the Storytelling by Students platform was developed and filled with diverse content. The platform can be accessed at https://storytelling.cts.wien/ In order to make this experience possible, a website concept was designed that is intended to encourage interaction and participation and also clearly displays the students content. In the course of this, an attractive and accessible logo was also designed to facilitate identification with the project. As content, 3 podcasts, 5 text contributions and 10 video contributions were created and published. The content can be found under the website categories: Study Choice, University Life and Life Outside of University. In total, over 40 people are represented on the website, ensuring a first kick-start for networking about student life. This foundation offers the potential to further expand networking among students as well as among students and pupils.

Furthermore, a course entitled “Using the camera to tell stories - storytelling and film design” was created in the project. The aim of this course was to teach students multimedia skills. The topics ranged from image composition, framing, shot sizes, perspectives, voice, filmic design, sound level, recording equipment and montage to editing. Accordingly, a broad range of knowledge was available, which supported the students participating in the LVA in developing content for the Storytelling by Students platform. In particular, the students’ storytelling skills were strengthened in order to be able to do meaningful storytelling, which helps students to develop their ideas into stories. In the future, the Storytelling by Students platform is to be further integrated into the regular course on “Representing Technology” in order to constantly prepare further content for the Storytelling by Students platform with the help of the elaborated specialist knowledge.

The project itself and the resulting Storytelling by Students platform, as the central result of the project, were disseminated through different places. On the one hand, the project was reported on at the Best Messe 23 in order to recruit potential students who wanted to find out more about the website. Furthermore, the project was presented to the students in the course “Storytelling with the Camera - Storytelling and Film Design”, who could then act as multipliers for other students who wanted to participate in the project. In addition, the Storytelling by Students platform was presented at the F&E Cafe at the FH Campus and at the CTS//midsommar.2023 event, which made it possible to inform other interested people about the project.