July 22, 2010
Kids and digital storytelling: Who will teach them?
By Robert Niles
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But it's not just my son. For many of his elementary school classmates, producing and distributing video has become as ubiquitous as writing and passing paper notes was to students of my generation. I've seen kids whip out Flip cameras and cellphones at school events and around the neighborhood, recording their conversations, performances and play.
Don't mistake this as the activity of a privileged few. These are children at a public school where more than half the students are receiving free or reduced-price lunches. Thanks to cheap cellphones and Flips, digital video technology has become so inexpensive that it's penetrated well beyond the middle class into poor segments of American society.
When I taught journalism in the university, I'd note with other instructors how the undergraduates typically knew much more about publishing online than the graduate students. And that high school students who'd come on campus during the summer could do more still. I'd joke that if we could just get some elementary students on campus, we'd could get moving with some really advanced online publishing work.
It's no joke. My son's grown better at video editing now than I am. My wife and I have given up shooting and editing video, and now assign all that work for our websites to our son. For a recent clip on my wife's website, our son set up a green screen background, shot the video, edited in a slow motion sequence and laid down a musical track he'd recorded of my wife performing, then uploaded his edited work to YouTube (using my wife's account - we won't let him lie about his age to set up a YouTube or Facebook account, although many of his friends have).
How on Earth did he learn how to do this video work? It wasn't through his school - most of the teachers there remain as flummoxed by this technology as I sometimes feel. Nor did he learn it from me, or from a textbook. He taught himself video production the same way that I taught myself Web publishing over 15 years ago - by reading about it online and then trying it for himself.
And that's what has me rethinking the direction that journalism education needs to be taking. It's not simply the accelerating pace at which younger students are accumulating digital production skills. We knew that was happening, and smart educators have been anticipating that, slowing shifting the emphasis of even introductory classes from teaching basic multimedia production skills to the application of those skills to producing more engaging news storytelling.
What intrigues me, though, is the way that many younger students, even elementary-age children, are embracing the Internet for self-instruction. This seems to me an emerging opportunity for post-secondary educators. Why leave what was previously our work to others? If students have the passion to pursue, at an early age, something that we teach at an advanced level, why shouldn't we draw a path between where they are now and where we can lead them?
Spending as much time as I have in local public schools, I've seen that children, who are by their nature curious, eventually lose that curiosity when they see no pathway to reward for it. The Internet is providing a new pathway for many children, but that pathway will only be as rewarding for them as those of us publishing online make it.
In my local public school district, the state of California is cutting $23 million from the district's budget for the upcoming year. (In California, elementary and secondary school funding comes from the state, thanks to a property tax "reform" initiative in 1978 that gutted local funding for schools.) With the end of the Obama administration's stimulus package, which helped school districts across the country - including mine - avoid draconian budget cuts in the face of collapsing state and local funding, school districts across America need help.
Elementary and secondary schools barely have the money and community support to keep their existing classrooms functioning, and in too many cases, don't even have that. I can't see a major effort to develop supplementary online curricula coming from that segment of the education profession, as much as students need that to happen.
But universities and their faculty members could step up. We need more efforts in the spirit of MIT's Scratch, which helps teach elementary students the basics of computer programming. The Knight Foundation has supported the American University's School of Communication's J-Lab, which aims to teach journalists and news consumers how to use digital technology to report the news. Perhaps a similar effort could be aimed at younger citizens, including elementary students?
The passion for digital storytelling among young students today is there, and growing. As journalists, we should be thrilled not only by that, but also by the fact that children today are embracing primary sources. It's not enough for them to hear or read about someone doing something. They want to go on YouTube, or Facebook, or the Web, and see it for themselves. They want to see the original video, a copy of the original e-mail, or of the original text message. They're natural reporters!
Our children want to participate in a golden age of digital communication. Will today journalism educators help lead them there? Or will they just keep teaching the same topics in the same way as they have before, leaving today's children to develop a new communication revolution in which existing journalism and education institutions remain irrelevant to their generation? It's our choice.
More about: journalism education
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Comments:
From steve Duval on July 24, 2010 at 1:33 AM
Hey Robert,Great post I enjoyed reading it, look forward to reading some more soon
Have A Good Day
Steve Duval http://steve-duval.com
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From 97.113.58.5 on July 23, 2010 at 11:05 AM
Robert, nice post. I wrote something along the lines on my blog a couple of days ago (http://joshl.us/vbu). As a recently graduated j-student, I found that most of the time I was frustrated by my professors' lack of expertise in multimedia and website production. It got so discouraging (with a professor teaching us how to use iWeb, eyeroll) that I basically stopped going to class. Instead I spent my time on internships and learning from practicing professionals a few years older than me online and in person. -Josh Lynch