Making Things That Are Just Okay: Process, “Wrongness”, Meaningfulness, and the Path to Fluency

       It is also easy to get excited and say that having created this fundamentally fun but “professionally” underwhelming short, the young directors achieved a new level of digital fluency.

    This formal model obscures the most important parts of long-term learning—self-led questioning, experimenting, repetition, and retention. Not only are these kinds of informal processes important for kids’ learning, but they are exactly how we, as adults, come by our own limited proficiencies as everyday, functional users of the various technologies that propel us forward, from cars to computers to mobile phones. And yet these competencies suffice to earn us livings, keep roofs over our heads, and even occasionally afford us some degree of self-expression.

    Instead the adults wanted to narrow in on the proactive core of simply having ideas and finding the means to convey them through the chosen medium.

    “Our definition of ‘making’ became if we’re shooting ideas that we’ve fleshed out, we as the director group will work to flesh those out in the editing,” he said, focusing instead on “how much can we just shoot and create under the context of a camera being the paintbrush. Just shooting is the end goal for the kids on the day, knowing that they’re shooting and having an idea and directing it.”

    As long as we understand and acknowledge that in a networked era, “producing” may not always depend on any given user’s absolute fluency with every step of the production process.

    They knew that they could make that because of the resources that they had, they really were just truly being very creative and directing without any pretense of ‘Is this possible?’”

    The arrival of “wrongness” in the creative process was half of what had given Murai tremors in college (“If you have an idea, even if it’s really stupid, if it’s just you and the camera, you can do it and see what happens. There’s no pressure if it doesn’t work out. … There isn’t such a thing as a mistake”.

    “How do I make that?” (where meaningfulness rests in the process of figuring something out) versus “Is this possible?” (where the weight of meaningfulness relies on the outcome, even before the task is undertaken).

    Retaining “failure” as part of the diction of process puts a positive spin on a spectrum that has a limited number of outcomes: failure or success.

    Not that assessment doesn’t exist or that assessment is not still valuable but that “failure” in the temporal context of sustained progression or the social context of a knowledge community can actually be a first step.

    As digital tools become not only simpler to use but more thoroughly woven into our lives, they become more and more like pencils or paintbrushes—extensions of our expressive appendages, rather than interfaces to be wrestled with.

    “I think it’s all about removing all the filters between intent and what you’re expressing.”

    “I don’t know about you guys, but when I was a kid, I went to a camp that was also supposed to teach kids how to make movies. And the main thing I remember about that camp was kids weren’t allowed to touch the cameras.”

    “Fast-forward a few steps [and] it really becomes apparent, where these kids just have cameras and have things that can make stuff, and they don’t really ever have to understand how it works, and they don’t have to respect it as technology in the way that we were raised respecting technology as this valued product of science.”