The Need for Storytelling Skills
by Langwitches ~ July 20th, 2009. Filed under: 21st Century Learning, 21st Century Skills, Digital Storytelling, Information.
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Daniel Pink in “A Whole New Mind” describes how the need for storytelling skills in the information age has increased.
As information and
facts are ubiquitous, nearly free and available at the speed of light [...] What begins to matter more is the ability to place these facts in context and to deliver them with emotional impact.
Jason Ohler, in his book “Digital Storytelling in the Classroom“, talks about how stories
help us remember important information that might be forgotten if it’s delivered to us in the form of reports, lectures, or isolated bits of information.
Ohler sees storytelling as an information organizer.
we desperately need tools to navigate and coordinate the immense amount of information available to us.
Pink and Ohler are not the only ones putting information abundance and storytelling together.
Bernajean Porter in her book Digitales- The Art of Telling Digital Stories writes:
Artificial intelligence research is showing that the more people are buried in the mind-numbing avalanche of today’s information, the greater the importance of stories in making sense of the endless pieces of data. While storytelling does not replace analytical thinking, good stories do provide an essential process for conveying information in an easily absorbed form.
There is increasing urgency to develop communication skills that translate raw information into valuable knowledge for ourselves as well as others. Discovering the personal meanings of topics or events helps us create memory, meaning and understanding of the data and complexity in our lives.
ISTE SIG group for Digital Storytelling.
The more people are buried in the mind-numbing avalanche of today’s information, the greater the importance of stories in making sense of the endless pieces of data. It is the act of telling our personal story – of creating an emotional connection to information and experiences – sharing in story form what we know and understand from an event or topic that provides a “sense-making” process enabling our brains to organize a myriad of factoids.
Image by Will Lion
If we look at the above image that visualizes a quote from Mitchell Kapor:
Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.
It is easy to understand that we need to find a tool that allows us to channel the water, a tool that prevents us to waste all that precious water that is being squandered and not to be blown away by the pressure.
What if the skill of storytelling can be the tool that helps us organize, remember and connect facts from the ocean of information that is coming out of that fire hydrant?
- There is more INFORMATION out there than ever before in human history. We (and our students) need to learn how to find, evaluate and make sense out of all this information that we are bombarded with through many types of different media.
- WHAT HAPPENS when we have obtained this/these information/facts? What do we do with it? How will we remember? How will we archive for future retrieval?
It is precisely THAT ability (organize/connect/remix/create) that we need to foster in ourselves and our students . The ability to put these facts in context. The amount of facts alone (without context) just overwhelms us. - Storytelling (putting information in a narrative context) might be the answer to our need to make sense of this vast information that is available to us anytime, anywhere and anyhow.
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July 20th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
I would agree. Everyone likes a good story. As I look back and try to remember the teachers who stand out for me, one of the things that most of them had in common was their ability to tell stories with the information. Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham, in his 2009 “Why Don’t Students Like School” suggests that teachers try to incorporate the story structure to the way they organize the material that they want their students to think about. I don’t consider myself a great storyteller by any means, but maybe the knowledge of their impact will encourage me to reshape some of my future lessons accordingly.
July 21st, 2009 at 9:35 am
Silvia,
Thank you for gleaning the great quotes from the above resources. To your list, I would also add Nikos Theodosakis’s The Director in the Classroom. In his opening chapters, he explains why filmmaking belongs in the classroom: for learning in a world of change, for living and learning in a visual world, for developing higher-order thinking skills, for developing personal and social skills, for raising awareness.
Part 1 starts with a quote from Stanley Kubrick: “I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.”
Don’t know how it is down your way, but in so many of our US schools, especially in Title 1 (high poverty) schools, teachers are still locked into scripted curriculum that takes over the entire instructional day.
There’s nothing like having the research at your fingertips when administrators ask why students are not working on textbook, test-prep driven activities. Thanks again,
Gail
July 21st, 2009 at 1:52 pm
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December 2nd, 2009 at 6:07 pm
Love your message as well as quotes from Pink and Ohler. Would you please be willing to add my name, acknowledgement and/or website with the quotes pulled from my book DigiTales: The Art of Telling Digital Stories in this blog as well
and . . . maybe instead of putting digital storytelling – ISTE – you might add ISTE SIG group for Digital Storytelling. As it happens – I established this new SIG group – put a lot of effort into launching a SIG national project with ISTE to gather stories for ISTE 30 year anniversary in DC – and the quote used was content I added. Small world, eh?
Keep up the inspiring work – Bernajean
December 2nd, 2009 at 8:47 pm
@Bernajean,
Done, I added adn updated your name to the link of your book “Digitales”. Thank you for the inspirational quotes.