After two years of successful events, the Creative Writing Project team returned to conduct another series of workshops this academic year. On 22 October 2021, Dr Christelle Davis opened the year-long series with a 1.5-hour introductory workshop on digital narratives. Digital narratives, also known as digital storytelling, multimodal narratives, and blended storytelling, blends a variety of digital elements to create a multimedia story presentation. This is the first time that this genre was taught in the series, which was propelled by the rapid rise of creative technologies and the increasingly digitally-connected world. Due to the nature of the genre, this workshop was conducted on Zoom to allow students to make full use of the technologies and resources at their fingertips. In the first half of the workshop, Dr Davis provided an introduction to the genre and provided step by step explanations on how students could create their own digital narratives, which covered topics such as structure, scripting, storyboarding, and proper means of copyrighting media. To provide students with real pieces of writing to reference, examples of professionally published digital narratives were shown and a brief analysis of the pre-workshop reading was conducted.  

In the second half of the workshop, students were given more opportunities to experiment with this genre. The smaller sized class allowed for a more intimate writing experience and greater engagement in collaborative writing. This arrangement was especially effective with the short interactive writing prompts on Padlet, where students had opportunities to share their own multimedia creations and receive feedback. A wide assortment of useful links and media resources for further learning were provided throughout the session. Students gave the workshop great praise and appreciated Dr Davis’ enthusiasm and expertise. The Creative Writing Project team is grateful to receive such encouragement on this new endeavour and looks forward to conducting more sessions in the future.