Rethinking Digital Storytelling at NMC

Last week, I attended my first NMC Conference in Anaheim. It was amazing to meet so many people with similar interests, catch up with old friends, learn a ton about educational technology, and bump into various Disney characters along the way. And while there is much to report back, I'd like to reflect on one underlying theme that seemed to resurface throughout the conference, particularly with regards to digital storytelling and teaching and learning. After various conversations and panels about the current state of technology and culture, it occurred to me that the broad dispersal of content across media platforms and the simultaneous convergence of media platforms (i.e. the iPad) puts educators in a strange position. How do we prepare students for a digital world so entwined with both sets of phenomena?

Part of the answer is to develop two distinct yet complementary skills: transmedia navigation--the ability to scope out, evaluate, and produce content from a range of different media sources and multimedia integration--the ability to synthesize various media elements into one coherent and meaningful composition. In other words, transmedia navigation involves finding and creating the 'puzzle pieces' from a range of media channels; multimedia integration involves piecing them together.

Let me give you an example from a pre-conference workshop I attended called "Learning from Telling Visual Stories." Taught by Bryan Alexander and Joan Getman, two of the top thinkers in this area, the session provided a terrific overview of story structure, visual literacy, and cloud computing. In particular, we focused on strategies for transforming fact-based research into compelling digital narratives. One exercise asked us to experiment with this notion of translation by converting an original 6-word story (which we wrote earlier in the workshop) into a 6-image digital story. Instead of using a single video editing application however, we ventured into the vast Web 2.0 terrain--playing with possible combinations in Five Card Flickr, recording voice over in Aviary, developing a timeline in Dipity, cutting together video with Jay Cut (to name just a few of the options)--and then figuring out how it could all fit together.

No one platform could accomplish everything and each platform had distinct disadvantages and advantages. The trick was to learn my way around these free, open source products, evaluate what element of the story could best be told here, and decide how it might be exported into another platform. This was a much different experience than tossing a smörgåsbord of media into iMovie and working within a centralized hub. After just 15 minutes, here's what I came up with:  



(images from Flickr, sound effects from FreeSound, voice over recorded in Aviary, compiled in Jay Cut) 

Despite being a silly, whimsical piece, I did get a sense for the value of story creation in the transmedia mode. What really struck me was the sheer breadth of easy to use, Web 2.0 services that could, when properly coalesced, produce comparable basic videos to iMovie.
Let's face it, when students enter the workplace, many are never going to touch a Mac after their access to Media Commons expires. But they may remember that Voice Thread worked best for group collaboration or that Aviary worked best for podcasting. And crucially, students will be able to access these services (or something similar) anytime, anywhere, long after they graduate. 

Henry Jenkins recently noted that transmedia refers to the "dispersal of content across media platforms," whereas multimedia refers to the "integration of media content within a single application." So by this logic, we might think of free online services as tools that promote transmedia navigation and software-based applications like iMovie and Final Cut Pro as tools specializing in multimedia integration. My question is essentially this: shouldn't we be teaching both?