Some researchers claim that the use of digital technology in educational settings might create dialogical spaces that potentially provide rich learning situations (see for example Wegerif, 2007). The aim of this study is to explore how students interact and discuss when working on digital storytelling projects in school related to the subject of history. There is a growing corpus of research on digital storytelling for educational purposes (see for examples Burgess, 2006; Davis, 2005; Hull & Katz, 2006; Nelson, Hull, & Roche-Smith, 2008), but many of these studies does not provide detailed analyses of what students actually “do” when making digital stories. Thus the purpose of this paper is to make a contribution to understand how digital stories are made meaningful to students as learners in situ. The research data are collected in a lower secondary classroom in a medium sized city in Norway, where 9th grade students are involved in a project on making digital stories within the thematic frame of World War II. The duration of the project was one week (18 hours), and in the end of the week the students presented their digital stories in the school’s auditorium. Data collection have been carried out during the whole project, covering activities from the beginning (the development of themes for the stories) to the end (where students presented the stories to each others). The research project is placed within the socio-cultural field of research, and the paper is very much inspired by dialogical approaches to meaning making (Bakhtin, 1986; Linell, 2009; Wertsch, 1991) where the concept of voice and multivoicedness is crucial in analyzing meaning making processes. The main aim of this paper is to analyze how the students are interacting in the making of digital stories, and on the other hand seek an understanding of how they are making meaning and negotiating identity (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998) within the frame of the project. In the end the paper will explore how this meaning making process is shaped by the formal educational setting.

The research project is a qualitative case study inspired by an ethnographic methodology (Bryman, 2004; Heath & Street, 2008), and takes its point of departure in studying activities in their natural settings – something which means the data set to some extent is “naturally occurring” (Silverman, 2006). Videotaping students’ work on digital storytelling, conducting group interviews, field notes, the digital stories constitute the data material. The data material is subjected to interaction and discourse analysis (Davies & Harré, 1990; Gee & Green, 1998; Jordan & Henderson, 1995), approaches that have their point of departure in the assumption that realities and identities to a great extent are socially constructed in interactions. The actual utterances made by the students in talk around their digital storytelling projects are the main unit of analysis, and different “hotspots” (Jordan & Henderson, 1995) from the video material will be compared to other kinds of ethnographical data.

The findings suggests that to really grasp the making of a digital story in school, and how this activity becomes meaningful for the students as learners, one must study how different voices of both personal but also more institutional character, both developed in and out of school, comes together in talk during the process of making a digital story. The findings also suggest that students use much of their own informal experiences and interests when working on the digital stories. The analysis show that it is not enough to study how the different identities of students are related to this activity, but it is also of great importance to see how these different identities are related to each other. Students recruit different personal and more informal voices in the process of making the digital stories meaningful which enters into a dialogical relationship with more formal voices in the learning situations. This has great significance not just for understanding the work on digital storytelling in school, but any practice where digital technology is facilitated for learning in educational settings.