back story

Producing a "ken burns" documentary with MovieMaker or Photostory can be a more engaging, powerful way students demonstrate their deeper understanding of a subject. A traditional approach to a research projects is to ask students to sift through a selected body of content and "retell it in their own words."

"Students, you will write a reseach paper on a Civil War general." With this question, the teacher returns a series of similar pieces of work that spit back the hard facts from the encyclopedia, textbook, or even selected repositories on the web.

If however, the question was more interesting and connected to the student's world, the returned work is likely to be original with greater attention to detail. "Students, who do you admire, who do you respect, who would you follow? Consider why a civil war soldier would follow a particular general into battle. He depends on this general to keep him alive, to succeed in battle. Take the view of a soldier who has aligned his loyalty with a civil war general. Define this general through the eyes of his loyal soldier. As the soldier, write a letter to his parents back home that explains in detail the great qualities of this general and why you as the soldier dedicated your will to this great general.

I assert that the practice of digital storytelling naturally draws us to focus on the back story, not just the obvious facts. Your thoughts?