Storytelling

Storytelling

Humans are storytelling creatures. Whenever someone says, “that reminds me of a story…”  we prick up our ears and settle in to listen. Two recent Scientific American articles, The Secrets of Storytelling and Fiction Hones Social Skills shed new light on the intricacies and importance of storytelling.  The first article, by Jeremy Hsu on the secrets of storytelling, hones in on why our human brains seem to be particularly well wired for both telling and hearing stories.

The impact of storytelling

The second article dispels the myth that avid readers are isolated bookworms, out of touch with their social world.  The article’s author argues that we humans use stories as a kind of social simulation to help better understand ourselves and human character in general. That entering these imagined worlds of fiction help us to develop empathy and rehearse social interactions so that we are better fixed to take on another person’s point of view.  The article’s author cited a 2006 experiment conducted by Raymond Mar (University of Toronto).  Mar and his colleagues assessed the reading habits of 94 adults and tested their sample on emotion perception and social cognition (by asking them to make judgments/decisions on emotional state/interactions through photographs or video clips).  What they found was a positive correlation between reading fiction and the ability to correctly assess emotional states and interpret social cues.  In other words, the more fiction someone read, the stronger their social aptitude. This is an opinion I’ve long-held (perhaps rationalizing my love of fiction) but it was so gratifying to see it described so well, and  backed by scientific evidence, in a peer-reviewed journal.

Like many others, I’ve been transfixed by National Public Radio’s Story Corps project.  Since 2003, the non-profit Story Corps has recorded over 35,000 stories of people’s lives. These digitally recorded oral histories are broadcast weekly on NPR and archived at the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress. The heart of the Story Corps project is the interview. Typically, the storyteller is interviewed by a friend or loved one, urged on to recount a story familiar to both of them. In addition to the warm humanity that comes through in these stories, I’m always struck by the interplay between the interviewer and the storyteller – the nature of the questions, the good-natured coaxing, and the way that rapt listening works to loosen the storyteller’s tongue.

So what is it that makes a good story?  Ira Glass, from This American Life (another fabulous storytelling radio show from National Public Radio), in his video series on storytelling, outlines the building blocks of good storytelling. First, he explains, there is the anecdote – a sequence of actions, one thing following another.  The power of the anecdote is so great that, no matter how boring the facts, you still tune in because it is a sequence of events, like breadcrumbs, that you are eager to follow in order to get to the implied and hoped-for destination.  What’s going to happen? He goes on to say that good stories include bait. The bait typically comes in the form of a question that your story is shaped to answer. And then there’s the all-important point of the story – the moment of reflection, the insight, the ah-ha moment that brings your story together and makes it all worthwhile.  Similarly, Brian Sturm, UNC Chapel Hill, explains his view of storytelling, theory and practice in this video. He explains what a story is and how good stories weave together character, plot, and events as a unified whole and why they are so persuasive (he also tells some great stories in the bargain).

In thinking about storytelling, I found this visual resource helpful  - The Periodic Table of Storytelling. It provides a useful organizational framework  (familiar to any graduate of a general chemistry course) through the different tropes, genres and storytelling methods in a handy, navigable chart.

The periodic table of storytelling

“Digital storytelling” has become an educational buzz phrase as educators and administrators attempt to use participatory media tools so that students can tell their stories more effectively to a wider audience.  There are some amazing online resources to help any educator bring digital storytelling methods to their students.  If you haven’t already seen it the Center for Digital Storytelling (based in Berkeley, CA – natch) is an amazing online resource. Penguin books sponsors a wonderful called we tell stories.  Contests abound, like KQED’s Digital Storytelling Initiative. The University of Houston has a wonderful web site designed to support the educational uses of digital storytelling.  The National Storytelling network, a sort of guild for storytellers, has an interesting website chock-full of resources. And there is even an international conference on digital storytelling, slated for March 2012 in Valencia, Spain.  There’s a range of useful storytelling tools available online like VoiceThread, Pixton, Voki, Storify, and Tikatok - to name just a few.  The always amazing Alan Levine (aka CogDog)’s wiki site on “50 Ways to Tell a Story” is a terrific resource where he tells the same story using 50 different online tools so that you can figure out the unique affordances of each one.  With free and easy-to-use storytelling tools and video, we can all be published authors.

Then there is the notion of transmedia storytelling – the fine art of telling a story via a range of media types (print, audio, video, etc).  The idea is to craft your story in such a way so that it has built-in mobility, so that you harness the power of various media to augment, so that you tell parts in one way, embellish other parts in a different way.  Here is a PFSK series on The Future of Transmedia Storytelling that gives food for thought.

A Child's Christmas in Wales

This Christmas, as a family, we gathered together on Christmas Eve, as we do every year, to read aloud to each other Dylan Thomas’s Child’s Christmas in Wales.

“All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen.”

As it always does, that story wraps us in the warm glow of Christmas’s remembered bringing the snows, the guttering gas flames, the swelling uncles, and tipsy aunts to life – even though they were written about an age ago, in a place far far away.  Over dinner the next day, I urged my parents to tell stories from their youth to my listening sons. I could feel the story of my mother’s high school Latin teacher and my father’s first job as the operator of copier for architectural plans sinking into the fiber of my two sons’ young souls. Lodging there, expanding their perspective, and adding to the texture of what they will become.

Listening with Big Ears

I’ve been thinking a lot about listening these days. Mostly because I’ve had to do quite a bit of it. I’m working on a new project that involves a number of stakeholders with very different opinions about the planned outcomes. Wending our way to agreement involves some pretty serious listening.

So, I’ve been asking myself, what makes for good listening?  When you think about good listeners you’ve come across, what qualities do they have?  What makes them a good listener and how do they do it?  (please add your thoughts to the comments here, as I would love to expand this topic). As I usually do when chewing on something, I ask my trusted friends and colleagues what they think (they always come up with much savvier ideas than I can on my own).

Sure enough, they came up with all kinds of good stuff. And, as with any big, meaty question there is never one tidy answer. There are a number of listening approaches that work and a range of qualities that make different people good listeners. But it seems to me that a prime quality is the importance of listening without an agenda. As my friend, Chalon Bridges, told me listening is all about genuine curiosity, an interest in understanding others, a willingness to absorb new information, and a desire to grapple with colliding ideas and ambiguity – to not know the answer. 

Hmm…yes.  I think that “not knowing the answer” part is really important. I would refer to that as listening without an agenda. In conversations I often find that the listeners are not really listening, rather they are trolling for a shard of information that just might support their own point which they are so eager to make. They are listening, with an agenda, expecting (and then finding!) what they need to torque the conversation their way. Unfortunately this kind of listening ignores all the other information that comes in. When we listen this way, we filter and prevent ourselves from learning anything new or surprising. Listening well, without anticipating the answer, or when we’re careful to not creative ourselves too specific a map, we can leave ourselves open to new interpretations and information.

My friend, Ilona Miko (who is a neuroscientist) reminded me that there is a difference between hearing and listening. Hearing, of course, is a sensory process and listening is a cognitive translation of those hearing sensations.  She assures me that both are quite active processes, physiologically, but she went on to say that, for her, listening is also an active process consciously.  As in, when she listens, she finds that she needs to ask a lot of questions.  The questions help to clarify what is being said and adds to the information exchange. I know from being listened to by Ilona that her questions have the added benefit of reassuring the speaker that they are being carefully attended.

I also asked my friend, Josh Frost what he thinks and he came back with a favorite quote of his, from the movie, Pulp Fiction which I thought summed it all up beautifully.  It’s this exchange between Uma Thurman and John Travolta:

Pulp Fiction

 

UT:  ”Do you listen, or do you wait to talk?”

JT, after thinking for a moment: “I have to confess that I wait to talk. But I’m working on it.”

Not-Knowingness

Painting by Robin Remick

This week I came across a terrific piece in the Huffington Post by Brian Cohen (who is the President of Idyllwild Arts Academy) about teaching creativity.  In it, Cohen talks about the importance of giving students room to figure things out for themselves – allowing them to struggle a bit and discover on their own. He quotes the artist Paul Klee in the opener to his essay, “Genius is the error in the system.”

Which made me think of my good friend, Robin Remick, who is an abstract painter. I recently went to an Open Studio of hers and, much to my delight, she walked me through the work she had on display. There, in the studio where she created her stunning paintings, she talked to me about each piece.  Where she was when she painted in, what she was trying to accomplish, how the colors and materials she used worked together.  While listening to her, I was particularly struck by the role of error in her work. More than once she talked about “not knowing what would happen” and just rolling with it.  For instance, on one recent painting she had experimented with applying a coat of resin to the finished painting.  The resin bubbled up in an unexpected way which she, at first, saw as a problem. To correct it, she poured lavish amounts of resin on the bubbled up places and, in the process, created these thick dollops of resin that gave the painting an interesting textured look with unexpected visual dimension – which she ended up liking very much (me too).  She explained that it’s often that way with her work. That the so-called “mistakes” lead to unexpected discoveries, that working with new materials that she doesn’t yet fully understand leads to intriguing results. This, she told me, has become a familiar theme to her.

Of course, you must have confidence to let that happen. For Robin, who is a thoroughly trained painter, with an MFA and years of experience to guide her journeys and experiments, she has the confidence to roll with her “mistakes” and venture into new territory. But surely there is something to be captured from what she’s discovered – and what Brian Cohen recommends –  that could and should be applied to education? That we need to find room in our fervent curriculum planning to allow learners of all stripes to make mistakes, to take risks, to wander a bit and see where those foibles and flounderings lead? To spend time in that unsafe place of not-knowingness and get comfortable there?

As Cohen explains to the faculty in his academy, your first answer might not be your best and your last answer may well help you to get to the next, but it won’t be the next answer. Modeling that sort of not-knowingness and comfort with errors and unpredictable results feels incredibly right-headed to my ear.

“Creativity involves understanding and, paradoxically and simultaneously, not knowing; entering a process where ready answers are inadequate to the task, and where the resolution at first uncertain. You can know a lot about something and be thought to be good at it, yet not know for sure where things are going to come out.”

Learning in Action: Interview #4 with Ruth Gleicher

The Dunes project with Niles West High School

For about a month now, I’ve been blogging about an ongoing project with Ruth Gleicher, a high school biology teacher at Niles West High School, just outside Chicago.  You can read the first two posts here and here. Bascially, I’ve been riding along while Ruth has re-invented an ecological succession project, that she normally does with her AP Biology students. She wanted to give the project some new juice, incorporate web 2.0 tools into, and weave some formative assessment into the plan. With each major step in the project, I’ve interviewed Ruth to find out how it went, what she’s learned, and how the students have responded.  Here are the recorded interviews:

Interview #1

Interview #2

Interview #3

Interview #4

And here are the documents she refers to in the interviews:

The storyboarding guide:  storyboardfordunesproject.

The project’s RAFT rubric:  DunesRAFTrubric.

The reading guide:  readingguideindianadunes.

Ruth's Posterous space

Her students went on their field trip to the Indiana Dunes in September and have now completed their projects. The assignment was to tell the succession story of the Indiana Dunes to an audience of your choosing (making a connection between you, as the narrator, and your audience).  The students had multiple web 2.0 tools to choose from when creating their story – some created digital books, some shot video, some created comics, and still others did VoiceThreads.  You can find the students’ posted projects on their class blog site (pictured above). Without exception, they are creative and wonderful expressions of the students’ understanding of succession.  I was truly impressed by how much time and effort the students put into their work.

One of Ruth’s observations, now that the project is complete, is that she feels she has a much better handle on what her students know (and do not know) about succession.  In other words, their projects were deeper, authentic expressions of what they knew and understood.

Unfortunately, the formative assessment part of the plan didn’t go so well.  The students had two weeks between posting their project and the point at which Ruth would grade them. She encouraged them to comment on each other’s work and recruited a few other biology teachers to post comments.  Most of the students got 2 or 3 comments but, unfortunately, they didn’t respond to them nor did they opt to revise their project in light of the feedback (even though there were some specific issues to address). Ruth’s take is that this formative assessment loop is not a familiar path for her students – once an assignment is turned in, that’s the end of it. She’s eager for ideas to help encourage this important aspect of the project so if any of you have suggestions, please comment below – we’d love to hear them.

I also wanted to reflect on the way that Ruth and I have been working together. It’s interesting to tally up the many ways Ruth we productively used new media tools as we worked.

Skype:  Ruth and I used Skype for our planning conversations and for the interviews.  Since the voice were coming through my computer, I could easily record the conversation and then post the recordings online.

WireTap:  I use this regularly to record audio – it’s a wonderful, versatile, and fool-proof piece of recording software.

Google Docs:  Ruth posted all of her student worksheets and rubrics as Google Docs which made it easy for me to edit and add suggestions. It also made it easy for the students to access them – they could either save and then print them as PDFs or Word docs, or they could save a copy and create their own version of the original, also a Google Doc, so they could modify it, write in their answers, online.  Having the activity’s documents online will also make it easy for Ruth to share her work with other teachers.

VoiceThread:  A few of the students used VoiceThread for their projects.  They uploaded digital images taken on the field trip and added their own narration to the images to tell their succession story.

Issuu.  Quite few of the students used Issuu for their projects to make online books – Ruth’s speculation was that this was the easiest of the tools for the students to use and required much less work.

Pixton.  A few of the students created comic books, using Pixton, for their projects. This was the tool that Ruth was first drawn to.  She particularly liked the way you could add comic drawings to real photos to tell a story.

Posterous.  Ruth used this free application to create a publicly accessible blog site where her students could post their finished projects – all in one online spot – so that others could see them and comment. By posting the projects and specifically marking out time for peer review, Ruth is emphasizing important elements of the scientific process (as well as good writing) – multiple drafts, reshaping one’s ideas based on the meaningful input of peers and outside experts, editing, proofreading, and refinement. And since the projects are all online, and easily accessible, she’s erased the boundaries of the 50-minute class and the limits of getting feedback from those in attendance at Niles West HS.

Thanks, Ruth – it’s been a really good learning experience and great fun as well!

Sloan-C: It’s a Wrap

Sloan-C 17th Annual Online Education Conference

I’m back home, after an exhausting and exhilarating three days in Orlando at the 17th annual Sloan-C Online Education conference.  There were 1,488 attendees (from 25 countries and 47 states) and 600 virtual attendees – for me, this was my first Sloan conference.

Sloan-C Day Two: Howard Rheingold

Howard Rheingold

How could a day start any better than listening to a Howard Rheingold talk?  I ask ya.  And here’s how he began…

Learning should be…

- learner-centered

- social and peer-to-peer

- networked

Sloan-C Conference: Day Two

A SLOAN-C Welcome

Couldn’t help but smile when I opened my hotel room door (stumbling out to forage for coffee) to find a shrink-wrapped copy of the Chronicle of Higher Education (with special online education insert) on my doorstep.  Ah, yes…I am in the right place. Here at SLOAN-C, I feel like I’m steeping in the most satisfying cup of tea, surrounding by smart, adventurous thinkers who see education as an exciting landscape, full of potential.  Hundreds of sessions (each one sounds like something I’d like to hear about), live twitter feeds displayed around the hallways, each session’s outside the room poster includes a QR code (shown above), the exhibit hall chock-full of intriguing products and services, and even a smart phone app to create your own personalized conference schedule.

Report from Orlando: Attending My First Sloan-C Conference

Fun From Orlando, FL

I’ve always wanted to come to this conference, and here I am.  Reporting live. I arrived this afternoon (it’s in Orlando, FL this year – the 17th annual – at the Dolphin Hotel on Disney property) and, as I’m beginning to scribe this first post, the Disneyworld fireworks are going off in the background (a fitting end to a very exciting day).

“The Concentrated Force of the Buried Past”

The cover of Stephen Greenblatt's new book.

I went to hear the author, Stephen Greenblatt, speak at the Concord Festival of Authors this week.  Greenblatt is a Harvard literary critic, theorist and scholar, the author of many books, who is credited as one of the founders of the “new historicism” (which he refers to as “cultural poetics”).  He is most well-known for his book Will in the World, a biography of Williams Shakespeare, which positioned Shakespeare’s work firmly in his time – the idea that these great works should be properly considered in the time, the environment, in which Shakespeare lived – laying bare the mutual permeability between the literary and the historical.  Here’s what Greenblatt has to say about his work:

“My deep, ongoing interest is in the relation between literature and history, the process through which certain remarkable works of art are at once embedded in a highly specific life-world and seem to pull free of that life-world. I am constantly struck by the strangeness of reading works that seem addressed, personally and intimately, to me, and yet were written by people who crumbled to dust long ago”

Greenblatt is on the speaking circuit because of his new book, Swerve:  How the World Became Modern.  This book tells the story of a Roman named Lucretius who wrote a poem (“On The Nature of Things“) 2000 years ago, detailing his thoughts on everything from creation to religion to nature to death. The observations in his poem were highly technical and, in many ways, presaged modern science.  In particular, Lucretius described the universe as a collection of tiny atom-like particles in perpetual motion.  Deviations – or “swerves” – in these motions cause collision and alternate forms.  As Greenblatt says, “So much that is in Einstein or Freud or Darwin or Marx as there in the poem.”  Not only that but Lucretius postulated that the gods may exist, but they are utterly indifferent to humans, there is no soul and no afterlife – when we die, our “atoms” disperse and who we were becomes nothingness (views that are remarkably close to secular humanists). Pretty heady stuff for Roman times – and the times after.  Not surprisingly, Lucretius’s poem was banned as it was seen as heretical and disturbing. And so the poem disappeared.

Enter Poggio Bracciolini – a pre-Renaissance, Florentine “book hunter” who found freedom in pursuing the wisdom of the ancients, hunting down forgotten texts and manuscripts in the monasteries of Europe.  Greenblatt’s book chronicles Poggio’s story and, per his “historicism”, renders him in his time and place. Poggio discovered Lucretius’s poem in a monastery in southern Germany in 1417.  Once he delivered the poem, and rescued it from obscurity, the power of its idea did their work. Greenblatt traces the emergence of the poem’s impact through time – the Renaissance, Thomas More, Montaigne, Botticelli, Shakespeare, Thomas Jefferson – to being available for purchase today on Amazon.

In his talk at the Concord Festival of Authors, Greenblatt told a number of fascinating stories about his research for the book and about Poggio and Lucretius.  One story in particular stood out for me in its relationship to the McLuhan reading we’ve been doing this week.  And that is Greenblatt’s evaluation of Lucretius’s work as a Latin poem.  Apparently it is an intensely beautiful poem and a powerful execution of Latin at it’s best.  Through the years (before the poem was banned), school teachers regularly assigned it to their Latin students as a translation exercise.  Scholars saw the poem as a riveting challenge, its Latin structure intensely complex and beautiful.  What a wonderful example of the medium being the message.  It mattered that Lucretius’s ideas were presented in the form of a poem.

Painfully Coming to Grips with “The Medium is the Message”

Marshall McLuhan with Woody Allen in the movie, "Annie Hall"

We are now in week #7 of the New Media Faculty Seminar. Our NMFS  group of educators meet weekly, in Second Life, to discuss readings assigned by Gardner Campbell, the originator of the seminar series.  There are 13 of these NMFS groups, scattered around the country, who are all reading the same material and meeting on their own campuses. We are all united through a “mother blog“, where our posts from the individual group blogs are harvested.

This week, there were two readings by Marshall McLuhan, an excerpt from Gutenberg Galaxy and The Medium is the Message. I found both (particularly the first one) to be particularly difficult partly due to all the references (many to writers, philosophers, or academics that I do not know) and partly due to the internal inconsistencies in his writing.  I was greatly relieved to find that my fellow NMFS-ers felt the same way.

Willow Shenlin facilitated our discussion and did a wonderful job, diligently leading us through her favorite McLuhan-isms, as well as the parts that she found particularly confusing. And that’s what is so great about these weekly meetings – not only do they provide a structure to force you to read material you normally would not, but you get a chance to wrestle with the parts of it you don’t understand and benefit from the insights of the group.

WIllow Shenlin's set up

About mid-way through our 90-minutes, we took a field trip over to Willow’s property in SL to see a few exhibits that she’s put up, to help with the readings and bring them to life.  She’d put up a media viewer through which we watched this fondly-remembered scene from Annie Hall, where Woody Allen pulls the real Marshall McLuhan out to counter a blowhard who was standing behind him in line at a movie theater (god, I love that scene).  She also showed us this amazing TED talk by Nathalie Miebach which, as Willow put it, I would love to see Marshall McLuhan’s response to!

Marshall McLuhan bot

Willow also had a Marshal McLuhan “bot” (automated character) – pictured to the right – that spouted McLuhan quotes from a menu when you clicked on him.  It was hilarious – and helped me to relax and let the readings wash over me a bit more.

When I reflect on the McLuhan readings, there are a couple of “nuggets” (to borrow Gardner’s term) that are really sticking with me. The first is his idea of sense ratios.  How is information coming to us – through our ears? Our eyes?  Our fingertips?  McLuhan makes the point that changes to these sense ratios have consequences.  For example, with the invention of the alphabet and written communication, we shifted from a strong dependence on hearing to a more visually oriented culture.

The other McLuhan-ism that I am only now really beginning to understand is his classic “the medium is the message”.   I thought I knew what it meant (it certainly has a prominent place in our culture!), but I now realize that I didn’t.  What’s worse, like the blowhard in the Annie Hall movie, I had been misrepresenting it.  Oy.  In his essay, McLuhan points out that we over-emphasize the importance of content.  Let’s say, for instance, that we are looking at an image of a family, sitting around the dinner table, We would argue that it doesn’t matter if the image is a photograph, an oil painting, a screen shot, or a water-color – the important thing would be the content of the image – who is that family and what is happening in that dinner scene?  But McLuhan’s point is that the way that content affects us, the way we are able to experience ourselves in relationship to it, will change depending on the medium  in which it is expressed.  That it matters whether it’s a drawing, a movie, a book, or a television show.  He goes on to say that content actually distracts you from what happening technologically. As McLuhan puts it, “Content is the piece of juicy red meat that is carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.”  So, according to McLuhan, it’s vitally  important to be aware of the medium and the tradeoffs and impacts of that medium on us, every step of the way.

“It is not the content or use of the innovation, but the change in inter-personal dynamics that the innovation brings with it. We must look beyond the obvious and seek the non-obvious changes or effects that are enabled, enhanced, accelerated or extended by the new thing.”

One of the ways McLuhan tries to make this clear is through the concept of  ”extension”.  That is, that media is not just a tool, it becomes a part of us – an extension of what we can do.  I had a breakthrough on this when I listened to the podcast conversation between Gardner Campbell and Alan Levine for the McLuhan session of a past NMFS series, on the heels of our Wednesday session (I wish I’d listened to it before!).  Gardner used this perfectly simple and powerful example to explain what McLuhan means by “tools as extensions of ourselves”.  Here goes.

Pick up a hammer

“If you pick up a hammer, and hold it in your hand, what do you have?” Gardner asks.  In trying to answer that question, we immediately jump to capabilities (“you can build a house” or “now you need a nail”).  But Gardner urges us to, instead, think in terms of the most basic, the most obvious thing.  You have a hammer in your hand.  Simple.  And the, he says, McLuhan goes further. What McLuhan would say  is that you don’t have a hammer in your hand, what you now have is a “hammerhand”.  You’ve changed the hammer.  And you’ve changed your hand.  A new union, that neither one was before you picked up the hammer.

Aha. The penny dropped for me. And my next immediate thought was how very wrong I’ve been in a key element of my thinking about new media technology (this is the painful part). In my work, I spend a lot of time with teachers and students, talking with them (coaching them) about the use of new media as it’s applied to teaching and learning.  What I regularly say, in an attempt to soothe and reassure them, is that all of these wonderful web tools are just that – they are tools.  Not unlike a pencil or a chalkboard or a microscope.  What you do with the tool is what makes it worthwhile.  What you plan, create, devise is what has meaning.  Oh dear.  Exactly the opposite of what McLuhan is saying.

As I sit here and type on this computer  (and create this blog entry), the computer (and the blogging platform) have become an extension of me. We are now united to do something that I (or the computer, or the blogging platform) could not do without each other. The computer and the blogging platform are not just tools. They have changed my thinking and the very way I interact with the world.  We are united and have moved together to a different understanding.

One of the McLuhan quotes that I’ve always loved (and used quite often) is his lament that man is “shuffling toward the 21st century in the shackles of 19th century perceptions”.   In his lifetime, he didn’t see the laptop computer, the cell phone, or the tablet – but he did give us a way to think about them, a way to make sure we are in right relationship with our tools and the way we use them.