I will warn you up front that you may interpret this post as an attack on digital story telling and those who have popularized this concept and related classroom activities. If you come to this conclusion – 1) my communication skills need to be improved, 2) you need to carefully reread this post. My concern is more accurately captured in my version of the expression – “if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything else begins to look like a nail”. My concern is that many important educational purposes for student generated multimedia may not be apparent when teachers interpret the phrase “digital storytelling”.
I am assuming that digital storytelling is proposed as a generative activity. By this I mean an external task (writing the story, creating the video) that encourages understanding and retention of some topic. If you assume storytelling is a unique form of communication and the primary function of such activities is to develop communication skills, your perspective is perfectly acceptable. However, I am thinking others see a broader potential in such activities.
I think my concern is that we confuse “description” with “explanation” (and if you are the individual doing the explaining – personal understanding). I happen to think of this perspective today while presenting to my undergrad class. The topic happened to be the different goals of science and perhaps the confusion of consumers as to what each role has accomplished. So, one role might be description. Those in the field of developmental psychology might collect data in order to inform parents of developmental milestones just because parents might be curious as to when they might expect their child to do this or that. The issue was really whether the data the researcher had collected really allowed for more and whether as consumers we would notice should other claims be made.
It occurred to me that those interested in generative processes have a history of noting a similar distinction in student tasks. The distinction between “knowledge telling” and “knowledge transforming” comes to mind. I understand that story telling can be quite transformational. For example, the documentary filmmaker sometimes generates a product to make a point. This is different from a documentary that chronicles an event and assumes that the viewer will bring meaning to the description.
What is it the teacher assumes when setting out to engage his/her students in generating a story? Here is what happened when we visited the zoo could be a description of events or it could be reflection on the nutritional needs of various animals and what we might want to consider in regard to our own nutritional needs. Nothing wrong with either “story”, but I would suggest the two stories accomplish very different things.
Are there better ways to explain the generative potential of student productions? I don’t know. How about “Teach what you know” or “Teach what you have learned”? I suppose any tactic could lapse into description, but we need at least some activities that are likely to encourage reflection and the construction of a personal understanding.
