I attended the NMC 2008 summer conference last week at Princeton, NJ. There was a lot of sessions and discussion about digital storytelling. At first I was having a hard time wrapping my head around all the excitement over digital storytelling coming from the education realm. I understand the enthusiasm around digital storytelling in the democratic media sense. I can appreciate it as a art form. But why so much talk of the intersection of digital storytelling and education?
I got my answer on Friday afternoon. Joan Freedman and Michael Reese from John Hopkins did a "five minutes of fame" session where they talked about what they termed as a "humanities lab". They had a class about the Vietnam War era of American history which included a scheduled lab. The students had several multimedia assignments they had to complete during the semester. One assignment was to write and record a protest song. Another one was to create a propaganda poster. It hit me as I saw the examples of the students' work. These students were forging an emotional connection to the subject matter. They had to put themselves in the mindset of the people of the time, and to actually experience that time in some small measure. I could see that it was indeed a much deeper experience than the more purely intellectual experience of simply reading and writing about a subject. In some way they were actually touching the subject matter. This goes beyond simply translating an essay or report into a video. This was something else.
I saw many examples of video/audio/music assignments at the conference. Some were just a typical paper turned into a video. Some seemed to lack any real content, IMHO. But there is a third category.....
During Henry Jenkins closing plenary, he played the opening of the clip below. Check it out.
Imagine the relationship the person who wrote that song had to have to the novel in order to create it. Imagine how that relationship was deepened by that act of creation. Now, that video is not an example of a class assignment. And it may be beyond what we could reasonably expect a student to produce. But the idea still holds. This is about students forging a new relationship with the subject matter through the act of creation.
This has kinda totally changed my view on education. Maybe my view was far too limited to start with. But wat really is the point of education? Especially a humanities/liberal arts education? Isn't it really at its base about fostering relationships with learning in general, and flaming passion around the concepts of the subject matter in particular? How are these goals being met by current teaching practices? This is a topic I want to explore more.
Of course, it is generally difficult to assess this kind of student work, especially in any sort of standardize way.
Another issue is supporting students in this kind of media creation. The John Lennon Education tour bus (http://www.lennonbus.org/) was on hand at NMC. Its staff can help people with no experience with music or video create music and video. And of course, there is the Digital Commons at Penn State, which is pretty much the same thing, but not on wheels. So, I feel like this is more and more of a non-issue.
I have no idea if what I am writing here makes any sense, or if this has been blatantly obvious to you all for a while now. What do you think? Let me know.
Recent Comments