Final Project

Describe How DS can be used in Forensic Science Education

• Final project presentation

http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dc759d6m_319grjs3zf8

• Introduction
  

The TV drama- crime scene investigation (CSI) is very popular and forensic science has became one of the popular major recently. The stories of the drama are engaging, but people might ask "is that true?" The purpose of this project is going to tell you the true stories of crime scene investigation from the students who majored in forensic science.
At the end of this project, a new page of digital storytelling website will be conducted and all the digital stories will be shared. The following is the anticipated web page.

• Forensic Science Education and Digital Storytelling
  

Forensic science degree programs are expected to deliver a strong and credible science foundation that emphasizes the scientific method and problem-solving skills. A forensic scientist must be capable of integrating knowledge and skills in the examination, analysis, interpretation, reporting, and testimonial support of physical evidence. Furthermore, a variety of skills are essential for forensic scientists (National Institute of Justice, 2004)

1. Critical thinking (quantitative reasoning and problem solving).
2. Decision making.
3. Good laboratory practices.
4. Awareness of laboratory safety.
5. Observation and attention to detail.
6. Computer proficiency.
7. Interpersonal skills.
8. Public speaking.
9. Oral and written communication.
10. Time management.
11. Prioritization of tasks.

As a result, we can see that the purpose of forensic science education is to provide students with the practical skills, knowledge and problem solving abilities that will promote their advancement within the field of forensic science. The graduates of forensic science program should have acquired skills including writing, public speaking, oral communication, computer proficiency and etc. Therefore, how to educate the students majored in forensic science with these indispensable skills will be the obligation and challenge for instructors.

Digital storytelling is a relatively new media and can be used in the classroom to promote teaching and learning. The students in particular are able to increase the following skills if they participate in the multiple steps of designing, creating and presenting their own digital stories.(Robin, 2006)

1. Research Skills: Documenting the story, finding and analyzing pertinent information;
2. Writing Skills: Formulating a point of view and developing a script;
3. Organization Skills: Managing the scope of the project, the materials used and the time it takes to complete the task;
4. Technology Skills: learning to use a variety of tools, such as digital cameras, scanners, microphones and multimedia authoring software;
5. Presentation Skills: Deciding how to best present the story to an audience;
6. Interview Skills: Finding sources to interview and determining questions to ask;
7. Interpersonal Skills: Working within a group and determining individual roles for group members;
8. Problem-Solving Skills: Learning to make decisions and overcome obstacles at all stages of the project, from inception to completion; and
9. Assessment Skills: Gaining expertise critiquing their own and others’ work.

According to the feathers of digital storytelling and the characteristics of forensic science education, they do reallly have some conjunctions. Digital storytelling could be a good resolution providing students more opportunity to cultivate the skills that is required to be a forensic scientist.

• How to use digital storytelling in forensic science education
  

Digital storytelling can be an effective instructional tool for teacher and an effective learning tool for students.(Robin, 2006). To explore how digital storytelling can be used in forensic science education, we can delve into these two dimensions.

Using Digital Storytelling as an instructional tool for teachers
Digital storytelling can be an engaging multimedia to served as an anticipatory material for students. The use of anticipatory sets can motivate students' leaning interest at the beginning of the class. The digital story can be either created by the instructor or embedded from Youtube or other websites.
Take fingerprints for example, you can get lots of fingerprints related video clips searching on Youtube.





Using Digital Storytelling as a learning tool for students
Digital Storytelling can be potent tool for student to demonstrate the understanding of the learning subject. Students may be given assignment in which they are asked to produce a digital story to reflect the observation and analytic presentation of laboratory section. The activity of digital storytelling can generate interest, attention and motivation for digital generation students and develop enhanced communications skills to present their ideas and knowledge in an individual and meaningful way by learning to organize ideas, ask questions, express opinions and construct narratives.

Take laboratory activities for example, students use sophisticated equipments to observe physical evidence that could be found in any crime scenes and conduct papers with digital photographs after the experiment. They are encouraged to tell a story about how to trace these evidences based on their own point of view. The following document is an example of student's report. http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dc759d6m_252hhv7w6f3

Digital Storytelling can be used as a way for students to express their laboratory report more intriguing. It not only can be an interesting assignments for students, but also a multimedia production that can be used for instructors for future teaching and learning situation. The following is the same report but reproduced in digital story format.

• Challenge

First of all, to integrate Digital Storytelling strategy into an online intensive summer course will be a huge challenge for this project. The participant of this project was supposed to be the students who enrolled in physical evidence class of SHSU in Spring 2009. Because of the time constraint and preparation for this course, the participant of this project now will be the students who enroll in forensic science online course in Summer 2009.

Second, learning how to use Microsoft Photostory will be an additional course load for students. How many credit hours should be used for software learning or just regard it as a basic computer proficiency that a college level student should have will be another difficulty.

• Future work

Create a tutorial web page for the students will be the priority work for this project. The EUODS website have already done a great job on this topic. I will definitely use these materials and other available resources that we have delved this semester for the future work of this project.

Create a new example page in EUODS website will be the next step. After finishing the online course, the digital story productions created will be shared in the website. These contributions will enrich the content of EUODS website.

A research paper will be conducted to evaluate the effect and outcome of using Digital Storytelling in this course. Further literature review and research methodology should be done before the Summer section begins.