I've been thinking a lot lately about storytelling lately; specifically the role that it plays in teaching and learning. In a sense, storytelling, in its oldest form, has always been about teaching. From our earlist oral traditions, we used storytelling to transmit important life lessons across generations. The form of a story, with its particular tone, characters, narrative, and dialog communicated these lessons in an engaging and memorable way. Early storytelling incorporated sophisticated aural and visual elements as well, intensifying the impression it made. Once you heard a well-crafted story, you could retell it more or less from memory. Even if you couldn't recite it word for word, you could make up some parts and still get the underlying lesson across. So in a sense, the function of storytelling in early civilization was a form of Pea's distributed intelligence - a mechanism for encoding ideas in a particular fashion to aid in retention and recall, even in the absense of written language. In this light, it's obvious why storytelling would be of interest to educators. As a person who is very passionate about the role of creativity in teaching and learning, and how digital media can augment teaching and learning, storytelling as an instructional technique appeals to me greatly.
What spurred me to think about this recently was the results of a series of student focus groups Ellysa Cahoy and I ran last semester. These students had recently completed a video project for one of their classes. Our interviews were designed to uncover the processes the students carried out to complete their projects, and their perceptions about the experience. We had provided a variety of training to help the students in using the required technology as well as using the library for their research. In reviewing the focus groups and looking through the student videos, it became obvious there was a specific point where things broke down for them. I should back up and say that my vision is to develop strategies to elevate media projects from the fluff assignments they can sometimes be to rigorous intellectual activities.. an opportunity for students to really learn the concepts they're attending to. An example of this was that we worked with the instructor for this course on building in mid-project deliverables to ensure students were engaged in a sustained effortful learning process, including going to the library and finding journal articles to inform what they would say in their videos, then creating storyboards, and refining their ideas in stages. The breakdown I noticed occured between this research and the actual video production. Essentially, they weren't always able to effectively translate their newfound knowledge into the medium of video. Their final products had some redeeming qualities, but they weren't the rich, creative expressions of new undertanding that I knew they could be and that we were trying to achieve in our approach to activity design.
Media Commons had already been doing some work in the area of digital storytelling, and we had recently hired a new consultant, Aaron Smith, who has brought in some interesting ideas about storytelling. Conversations with Aaron and all of the MC consultants over the last few months have culimated in an idea I had to use storytelling as a way to bridge traditional, familiar processes of information gathering and communicating ideas with video. While the most common and recognizable application of digital storytelling focuses on telling of life experiences (This American Life, etc.), I'm thinking of it as a technique to meet the needs of the typical university-level course, whether that be in engineering, agriculture, or liberal arts. It would be extremely powerful to provide students with a framework of strategies for building engaging narratives that effectively weave together visual and aural elements to elegantly communicate complex information, with the goal of producing stories that are both informative and entertaining. Constructing these stories would force students to identify the most critical ideas to support their topic (since video assignments are typically only around 3 minutes), to leverage multiple modes of communication, and to synthesize them into a coherent whole. But perhaps most importantly, they would have to go beyond the simple regurgitation of facts, and communicate in a way that ellicits an emotional reation from their audience. That's hard to do. But it's a motivating and effective way to learn. And I think it helps us bridge that conceptual gap that keeps students from communicating effectively in this medium.
Operationally, the challenge for us now is to package this in a way that can be easily incorporated into the course of a single student activity. One of the strategic decisions we made a long time ago was to encourage students to use simple tools like iMovie and Kaltura. The more shallow learning curve of these tools has freed us to incorporate a broader set of digital literacies in our workshops, including concepts like fair use and digital storytelling. So I think we're moving in the right direction, and we'll most certainly be talking more about this in the next few months.
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