With diminishing hope of achieving clarity and avoiding undue magnification of any critical notes in what is to follow, that I enjoyed Marco Torres’ NMC 2009 keynote “It’s Not About It, It’s About What to Do with It.” Marco’s talk on Day 2 was a good fit with Kathy Sierra’s the day before, demonstrating the best aspects of her talk (passion, teaching others how to kick ass, etc) in both his own presentation and in the examples of what he is doing working with learners.

Mulling over what I heard, I keep coming back to a few points:

Risk Taking – Marco pointed out that one of the cool things about digital technology (both in music and, I think, in general) is that it more readily allows users to take risks. It’s hard to learn (create) without taking risks, something Marco literally demonstrated as he pieced together a soundtrack in Garageband. Of course taking risks as a learner involves trust in yourself and your teacher(s). Living that trust is no low hurdle… and then we have to consider the dangers of risk-taking. After all, there is no risk without danger. There are complex issues here involving experimentation and sharing, the value of creating artifacts and the import of the existence of those artifacts living on into later parts of a student’s life. The movement toward more open education, involvement of social networking, and the ever-present promise and specter of portfolio creation—ad-hoc, formal and de-facto.

Complexity – Marco made two related arguments that others have also made: 1) our media is more complicated than it used to be (the foundational idea in Steven Johnson’s book Everything Bad is Good for You), and 2) the rich community that is built around these complicated media and entertainment properties is a place of learning and creation (echoing Stanley Jenkins’ arguments in Convergence Culture).

The first point feels specious: is comparing Gilligan’s Island with Lost a fair comparison, much less a meaningful way  of comparing US culture today with that of the mid-1960s? Isn’t Gilligan’s Island more fruitfully compared with According to Jim or the like? The “infosphere” no doubt continues to grow exponentially and our ability to access that information greater. But at some point, as long as we know the basics of access, exploration and management, that growth is meaningless in the way that if you know how to swim you can swim in 5- or 500-foot water equally well. It’s the optional skills of deep diving where new demands are most felt. There’s something a bit too self-congratulatory in contentions of how much more complex and difficult our lives are than they supposedly were in the golden days of yore, when it’s really just a shift in emphasis. It might be complex to negotiate the terrain of social networks and ubiquitous access to information, but it’s not really significantly more complex than other aspects of daily life we now take for granted. Not to mention that, being the victim of a gall bladder bursting a few years back, it is likely that 100 years ago I’d probably be dead.

I wholeheartedly agree with the second point… the communities built around shows like Lost and books like Harry Potter are impressive, rich and complex. The convergence and cooperation of media around such creations contributes greatly to that richness. But the mere fact of engagement in such communities begs the question of what is being learned there. Certainly participation in the constellation of sub-communities built around Lost demands learning something of communication, negotiation, persuasion and other valuable skills. But the big question is how this translates to (more) formal learning activities. How do we use the skills learned in such arenas? How do we create that kind of community or duplicate some of its dynamics? What (and how) do those communities mean for teaching and learning?

Assessment and Conformity – Underlying all discussions of storytelling and media creation as a part of learning is the question of assessment. Gardner Campbell’s Fear of Art session ably demonstrated the complexity inherent in assessing new media creations that are built with and upon new literacies (and fluencies). As a philosophical discussion we can dwell on the unanswerable, but at some point assessments are—at least for now—required of us. Marco’s story of the brilliant young musician who couldn’t play in his school orchestra reflects this problem. On the one hand, it’s clear that the young man in question was very talented and the school probably had no idea what to do with him… but at the same time, orchestras have conventions and repertoires and specific demands to be met. But is it really an unfair of assessment to keep the young man out of the orchestra when he is described as not wanting to play the music that orchestra was playing? Assessment is in part about conformity… and not all conformity is bad (and some acts of non-conformity are misplaced). But it does bring into light the way our institutions evaluate and work with outliers like this brilliant young musician, and if we had to assign them a grade, it would be a low one.

An Aside: Musical Meaning – Speaking of music, Marco demonstrated that–even at a relatively simple level–music can have meaning (the example of the two-key music in Jaws was apt) and the tools to get started creating musical accompaniment are well within the grasp of even casual users. But it does seem that the musical elements possible in digital storytelling are often under-emphasized or totally absent from many storytelling activities. Not only is this a “teachable moment” for considering intellectual property and copyright, but a place to introduce or expand upon the whole idea of music as a part of a larger production and the very idea that music can convey meaning. Which can lead into discussions of genre and transformation which can lead to richer storytelling.

Grammar and Language – Marco’s phrase (one of many clever phrases Marco employed) “schools teach the grammar of math, not the language of math” resonated with many in the audience because it’s true. In fact this same statement could be revised to apply to many disciplines—we teach the grammar of X but not the language of Y—and is at the heart of the literacy/fluency discussion in many of those areas. But it’s also true that trying to teach the language of math without the grammar would also be an epic fail for all but a very talented few. So the answer isn’t to “teach language” but to “also teach the language,” a distinction I fear is sometimes forgotten.

Memory and Memorization – Related to the necessity of grammar and implied by the critique of teaching grammar but not language are questions of memory and memorization. I was troubled by Marco’s anecdote regarding discussing curriculum with a group of teachers and then asking them if “everything they just talked about could be found on Google” and questioning their teaching on that basis (at least that’s how I heard it). The value of memorization—at the basic level of rote memorization, at the higher level of “practice,” and as an important part of the even more sophisticated ability to actually know something and be able to use that knowledge to achieve a higher creative state—has been dismissed too readily as part of our contemporary emphasis on teaching as facilitation and avoidance of “transfer” teaching.

Learning Styles – I was intrigued by the notion of learning styles as they apply to creation, not just reception, which seems under-emphasized in learning styles discussions. I was more intrigued by the idea—which I had not heard discussed before—that we need to consider individuals who have particularly apt styles when it comes to receiving information that are different from their styles while creating. The assumption always seems to be that these are the same—if I am a particularly good auditory learner then I will be more suited to creating audio, etc—but the more I consider this assumption, the more I think it is questionable (at least sometimes).