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This weeks class started off with Meagan and Alex talking about transmedia storytelling.  In a nutshell, this is where elements a dispersed across a variety of channels (media), serving to enhance or complete the narrative.  There is usually, also, a sense of interactive engagement.  One of the things that intrigued me about the presentation was the discussion of the three phases of game play: involvement, immersion, and assessment.  I also enjoyed the terms “tent poles” and “rabbit holes”  Rabbit holes I’ve talked about before, in respect to ARGs and how rabbit holes are used to draw people in.  In this case, the tent poles are the originating medium and the rabbit holes are various aspects of the entire transmedia encounter that, like rabbit holes in ARGs, draw people in.

Several examples were discussed, including The Matrix movie and Harry Potter.  Although both have strong narrative and are clearly transmedia, as we look at any of these implementations of narrative, in respect to education, we need to make sure there is space for articulation and reflection.

The class then went on to talk about how companies, like Disney for instance, have started to actively move into the education marketplace.  Although companies have always looked to have a place in education, this has really started to accelerate recently.  Whereas before it was happening in the schools, now it is happening by going around the schools.  This is dangerous as it means the content is being determined not necessarily by education professionals but by companies that are looking to make a profit as a greater motivator than education honestly and accurately.

In great part this has happened in a more accelerated fashion because of two reasons:  our schools are failing at engaging and helping our students to learn important things and parents are allowing this to happen.  I know thats a bold thing to say, especially as someone who does not have a child in a school system, but from my perspective I see two things going on here.  First, our schools are so much more focused on having students pass a test that they are forgetting how to teach them to learn.  Learning isn’t being able to spit answers out on some standardized test.  Sure, we can drill things into students, who will most likely forget them after the test, because we have not taught them how to come up with those answers, we’ve just taught them the answers.  If our schools spend as much effort in teaching students how to think constructively, they could figure out ways to come up with the answers to those, and many other test questions.  But being “better” is so important that we test and test and test and require our teachers teach to that test, so students will pass and the school will not be seen as a failure.

The other side to this equation is that parents need to take a much more active interest in their children’s’ education.  Now, before someone jumps all over me, I’m not saying ALL parents need to do this, although my guess is that most parents could be more involved.  I’m sure there are plenty of parents who have good reasons for not being able to be as involved, such as working long hours, or multiple jobs, in order for the family to be able to eat and keep a roof over head and clothing on everyone.  I’m not critiquing that.  But I am looking squarely at the parent who has not asked their children if they’ve done their homework and looked to make sure it was done.  Or the parent who has not read to their young child.  Or the parent who finds out who is part of the Board of Education and goes to vote when the time comes.  Board of Education votes are some of the lowest voter turn out of any election.  And, I’m not sure about where you live, but where I live, the education budget is nearly 50% of our taxes!  I don’t even have kids in the school systems and I’m interested.

Anyway, I digress.  Parents need to take a more active role in their students education.  If you don’t believe me, ask anyone you know who is a grade school teacher.

Ok, time to get off my soap box.  After Alex and Meagan I presented on Second Life.  Here are the three videos:

The 3D AIDS Quilt – http://bit.ly/3daidsquilt

The Life and Times of Uncle D – http://bit.ly/sluncled

Watch the World - http://youtu.be/vV1YbWBSXS8

Here are SLURLS for the places I took, and intended to take, the class on a “field trip”  I only had time for three, but the others are worth visiting, especially with respect to how narrative can be used as a teaching tool in a virtual world.

Visited

The Theorist Project - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Montclair%20State%20CEHSADP/80/200/23

AJ’s Writing Class Student’s Final Projects “The Dorms” - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Montclair%20State%20CHSS/64/206/22

Virtual Hallucination - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Sedig/26/45/22

Video (above) locations

3D AIDS Quilt - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Storybook%20Island/199/199/26

The Life and Times of Uncle D - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Story%20Quest%20Island/28/227/22

Other Locations

CHSS Quidditch Pitch - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Montclair%20State%20CHSS/100/21/22

Sistine Chapel - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Vassar/177/87/25

Svarga - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Svarga/7/124/22

Darfur - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Better%20World/176/245/21

Following my presentation on Second Life we saw a presentation on Balsamiq, which seems like an awesome tool.  I plan to contact them about a classroom copy for my lab.  A very useful outlining and wire framing tool.  During the presentation we also found out about Omnigraffle, and Hyperstudio 5, which I coincidently was considering taking advantage of a free copy I can get.  I guess now I will.

To close out our demonstrations, Meagan showed us what iMovie can do.  I am still so unhappy with Apple for what they did to iMovie after v6.  Once they took out the time line, the made it much more difficult for the average user like me to easily use the software.

To close out the class, and voluntarily heading into overtime, we chatted with Francine about the final projects, which we’ll start presenting on next week.

This weeks will we looked at games and learning.  Our class met in the CREATE lab and our special guests were Dr. Jan Plass, Director of Create and Paulette Goddard Professor in Digital Media and Learning Science, and doctoral candidate Jonathan Frye.  I’ve had the great pleasure of taking two courses with Jan, which you can find more about here and here if your interested, and am proud to consider Jon a friend and colleague in the ECT program.

Jan and Jon talked about games in education.  They started with discussing how naratology says games should be looked at like anything else, researched in the same terms, whereas ludology says games should be looked at on their own terms.  During the presentation, a question came up about the difference between a taxonomy and heuristics.  Heuristics is a set of rules that are somewhat unconnected and based on experience. A taxonomy is a categorizing framework that is theory based

We looked at several games and discussed the importance of a cut scene, which is where the game play stops and you watch something – it is literally a cut in the scene.  This is where much of the back story, or information that is important to the game but not part of the game play, can be provided to the player or learner.  In serious gaming, cut scenes can also alleviate player fatigue, which would happen when a player is at a high level of intensity for along period of times.

One of the things that Jan brought up is that games in education are a great measure of learning because they have embedded assessment.

Following Jan and Jon’s presentation, Adam Rodriquez and I made our presentation on games and narrative as a pedagogical tool.  A copy of our slide presentation you’ll find here.

This week’s class started with a visitor, Dr. Marsha Rock, who is a Professor of Journalism at New York University.  Dr. Rock is a documentarian and played clips from three of her works for us.  One was more engaging than the next and I told her in class that either her work was exceptionally engaging or she was just very good at picking our clips that would capture us.

She started off, however, by telling us about an assignment she did with her students.  I will definitely try this at some point with students and may even have my student workers try it in order to test some of the software/freeware we’ve been testing in the lab.

She had students identify three images that were about them, but not with them in it, and then three images of themselves.  She had them put these images together into a narrative that could only be a couple of minutes long.  Each student shared their creation with the class. Dr. Rock finished up by telling them that if they could capture from those they film/interview what they captures in those short clips, they would be successful journalists.  This is the power of narrative.

I was so enthralled with the videos that I neglected to take notes on them.  The first was about two women in Ireland, one Catholic and one Protestant, and was called Daughters of the Troubles: Belfast Stories.  The second one was about Dr. Rock and her life, called Dancing With My Father.  The third one was called Service: When Women Come Marching Home.

The only note I took was about a Marine who had been injured and the others in her company “had her back”, which many women in the military say they don’t get.  She almost died but her company leader went to dramatic means to keep her alive, driving from hospital to hospital (they could not get a medevac or ambulance).  In the interview, Dr. Rock says the marine commented on how  she “made sure the ‘boys’ had food”.

I thought to myself that this seemed to go against what these women were trying to accomplish by playing into the stereotype that the women will make food, etc…  I thought that this action, albeit one of kindness, was in some ways destructive.  Dr. Rock mentioned that the marine thought of herself first and foremost as a mother and that’s what she does, it’s an honest role.

One other interesting point Dr. Rock raised what the tendency of novice filmmakers to go to black between shots.  She stresses to them that they need to think about embedded transitions, which is true of any well crafted communication, whether its film, writing, etc.

We were supposed to get to three pedagogical models but we only managed to get to one and that was Digital Storytelling.  Digital storytelling, as originally conceived, was intended to enable people to tell their own stories, understand themselves, and an experience of their own. Most are short, included digital media, sometimes included a live performance as well.

It is considered an interactive medium that is a personal story, told in first person, always a POV, truthful, emotional, conversation tone (triggers interactivity).  Digital storytelling is both situated and constructive.

This week we started off by looking at Case-Based Reasoning.  I’ll admit that I had some difficulty with this particular concept.  CBR has come back up in class again (obviously, I’m not keep to my pledge to try to write these immediately after the class) and I think I have a better idea now, but I hope to get clarification later on (in future courses) should the need arise.

My understanding from the class presentation is that CBR is a problem solving approach that is based on past similar cases.  It integrates memory, learning, and reasoning and that reflection supports CBR.  The heart of CBR are the case libraries that act as a resource.  A paper by Ferguson, which is uploaded into Blackboard, details what makes a good case.

To try to get a better understanding, I decided to turn to Wikipedia, the friend or nemesis of academics, depending on who you ask.  According to the Wikipedia entry on Case-Based Reasoning, it is:

the process of solving new problems based on the solutions of similar past problems. An auto mechanic who fixes an engine by recalling another car that exhibited similar symptoms is using case-based reasoning. A lawyer who advocates a particular outcome in a trial based on legal precedents or a judge who creates case law is using case-based reasoning. So, too, an engineer copying working elements of nature (practicing biomimicry), is treating nature as a database of solutions to problems. Case-based reasoning is a prominent kind of analogy making.

It has been argued that case-based reasoning is not only a powerful method for computer reasoning, but also a pervasive behavior in everyday human problem solving; or, more radically, that all reasoning is based on past cases personally experienced. This view is related to prototype theory, which is most deeply explored in cognitive science

The lawyer/judge example drove it home for me.

Following this review of CBR we had two guests.  The first was Janelle Boucher from Kognito Interactive.  She spoke to use about storytelling and simulations.  She showed us more of a military reintegration simulation that Karisma has spoken in class about previously.

Our next guest was the creator of the PBS series “In the Mix” (I’m afraid her name escapes me, a problem with waiting too long to do these entires, I’ll add it her later on, once I find it out).  In the Mix is a show geared to teens and it covers a wide range of issues.  Our discussion was on storytelling and narrative as presented in a 30 minute television show.  We talked about what makes a compelling story and determined, for young people (in this specific case, the age of those who follow the show), it need to be both articulate and engaging.

This week started an exciting set of weekly visitors.  Or first two were Cath Milne, an NYU Assistant Professor of Science Education and Leonard Majzlin, an adjunct faculty member in the DMDL program (DMDL is the MA that is part of the same program that my own ECT (Educational Communication and Technology) program.  Before our visitors, we talked about Anchored Instruction.

Anchored instruction is a story based model of learning constructed specifically for designing live action motion picture.  Through this model, knowledge remains inert and every theory we’ve study is implicated in anchored instruction.  According to Wikipedia, anchored instruction is

“grounded in a story or narrative that presents a realistic (but fictional) situation and raises an over-arching question or problem (compare with an essential question posed by a teacher). This approach is designed to 1) engage the learner with a problem or series of related problems, 2) require the learner to develop goals and discover subgoals related to solving the problem(s), and 3) provide the learner with extensive and diverse opportunities to explore the problem(s) in a shared context with classmates.”

To illustrate anchored instruction we watched one of the Jasper Woodbury Series videos

Our first visitor was Cath Milne, whose area of focus is science education.  She talked about argument and how it is the key claim for knowledge making.  She noted that how we learn to make arguments and what structure they should have is the genre of choice, especially in science education.  Another key component is explanation.

She talked about event tokens, selecting the events, and how her science narratives are like applets, there are not the lesson, they are embedded in the lesson.  She also talked about “problematizing”, which she described at ”you think you know the answer, but…not so fast” and she believes that problematizing made a huge difference in her treatment group.

Our second guest was Leonard Majzlin, who focused on the narrative media in museums and public spaces.  He talked about installation media – a context in which the media is being encountered, only working in a specific context, such ast The Gates, which was installed in NYC in February of 2005.

He talked about 1980 (ish) being a transition time for museums, at time when they realized that, in my words not his, that they were no longer a “build it and they will come” experience.  They needed to find ways to engage people beyond just putting content out there.  He indicated that the prevailing thinking was, if museums could wrap their collections in a narrative they would be able to attract more visitors.  That narrative involved how the visitors interacted with the content that created a narrative for them to experience.