Flow: One Painting, Eight Times

One painting, eight ways.

Since we moved to Alameda last fall, a bike ride out to Alameda Point (and the decommissioned Naval Base) is part of my regular routine. Roughly a 7-mile round trip ride, it’s good exercise and I enjoy the strange isolation of the abandoned base, the wide open spaces, and the breathtaking views of San Francisco. Riding out there this weekend I was struck by the fact that every time I go, I see something previously unnoticed…an unusual building, a road option, a strangely worded sign, or a half buried railway track. This weekend it was the airport control tower, squatting at the western end of the base. How had I missed seeing that before?

My spurious powers of observation got me thinking about the value of repetition.  How much easier it is to find your way around a place that you’ve been to before.  How much more you notice on a subsequent visit. How much better a recipe turns out the second or third time its made.  How much more help you can be to someone new to a task when you yourself have done it before. And how much more I notice each time I visit Alameda Point.

Repetition is what I’m talking about here. Not redundancy. It’s pretty tough to stand up for needless duplication, boring drills, or mind-numbing recurrences.

Repetition, not redundancy.

The lesson took on a new dimension with a small water-color painting of a plucked flower, pictured at the top of this post. I sketched, then painted it. Unhappy with the result, I decided to try it again.  Better.  Maybe a third time?  Much better. Ok, so maybe I took the idea too far by trying the same painting eight times, but the resulting output was intriguing. It wasn’t a steady improvement where the eighth painting turned was the best of the bunch. Rather, some elements improved steadily – color blending, perspective on the leaves – while others (the sketched arch of the plant) were best in the earliest iterations.

It wasn’t the productivity or consistency sought in the automation of a process (such as the value of an assembly line) but there was a state of flow to the endeavor. My brain was fully engaged with the task and certain parts of it became easier and easier to do because I didn’t have to think about them too much.

Perhaps the most interesting part to me was the experience of inhabiting the process – dwelling there for more time than I normally would have devoted to it – which served up the opportunity to observe a range of possible outcomes.  There was comfort, even pleasure, in the recreation and insight to be gained.

“That reminds me of a story…”

Don’t you always perk up when you hear that?

We are storytelling creatures.  Not only do we love telling stories, but we love to hear them too.  When I think of favorite storytelling moments in my life here’s what I remember…

Gary Brusca.  My favorite teacher in college. He was a terrific scientist and a wonderful educator but it was only much later in life that I realized those skills  of his were linked to his storytelling talents.  It was like he couldn’t help himself in lecture, he would fall into stories about the creatures and environments under study.  My notes, like his lectures, were spiced with anecdotes, sketches, and beginning, middle and end markers.

Bathtime. When our two boys were little, they took baths together and evening bath time became the perfect venue for storytelling. I would perch next to them on the closed toilet and launch into the latest exploits of two sisters – Nita and Rita.  Those two girls got into so much trouble – skinned knees, crazy adventures, intense arguments and wild exploits.  Funnily enough, Nita and Rita’s adventures ran on a parallel track to the adventures of the two bath boys. It became this wonderful way to go over their day, put it all in perspective, and tell each other it was alright.  How many nights the bath water grew cold while we sat there together.

Wind in the Willows

Wind in the Willows. My Dad, reading Wind in Willows (by Kenneth Grahame) to me, long before I was probably old enough to really follow the meandering details of life on the river….Ratty, Mr. Toad, and Badger.  I loved them all and would beg him to keep reading.

A Frame? A Monitor? A Window…

NYC MOMA Exhibit

I was in New York City last weekend and stumbled upon a MOMA special exhibit called Inventing Abstraction.  I don’t know anything about abstract art but thought I’d venture in.  I still don’t know much, but I surprised myself by really enjoying the exhibit and finding a few new friends.

A section of the Delaunay painting.

Two artists in particular – Sonia Delaunay and Duncan Grant – caught my attention.  They both experimented with extended, continuous paintings.  In Delaunay’s case, she illustrated a poem by Blaise Cendrars called Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France.  The MOMA exhibit displayed her lovely work in a long, glass case, unfolded, so that you could see the way her abstract images wove together with the text of the Cendrars poem.  In Grant’s case, he experimented with a long, continuous scroll of paper on which he painted gouache, watercolor, and cut papers.  The MOMA exhibit included one such painting of his, Abstract Kinetic Collage Painting with Sound (1914). His idea was to view the painting through a rectangular aperture, 11″ high and 24″ wide.  The painting was to be mounted on twin spools, one on each side of the aperture, and then slowly passed across the aperture.  Since the viewer’s experience of the painting would be impacted by the rate at which it moved, Duncan determined that the painting should be paced by following a slow movement of one of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos.

Duncan Grant’s Abstract Kinetic Collage Painting with Sound.

I couldn’t help but connect this lovely idea to Bill Viola, the video artist. In his essay Will There Be Condominiums in Data Space (one of the required readings in the amazing New Media Faculty Seminars), Viola talks about breaking free from thinking of the video/computer screen as a monitor and, instead, think of it as a window.  He encourages us to think of our computers as three-dimensional space, with the viewer wandering through scenes and events evolving in time.

My 2012 Learning Harvest

Many years ago I worked with a woman who, each year, made a poster of sorts at New Year’s time. These posters were visual summaries of her year – key events, people, places, and ideas – and they served as a way for her to reflect on the year gone by and prepare for the year ahead.  It occurs to me now that she was way ahead of her time. Those posters were a type of personal infographic, before we knew what an infographic was (just take a look at these 2012 New Year’s infographics!).

So as 2012 winds to a close, and 2013 approaches, I will attempt my own year-end poster, in the form of a blog post – a look back at my 2012 learning harvest, as I prepare for 2013, and an attempt to make my own learning as transparent as possible. To honor the importance of personal learning networks, I will acknowledge along the way, the people who were mentors, advisors, thought-leaders, and role models to me (even if they didn’t know it).

Loving my iPad

Score for the Tablet. In 2012, I added an iPad 2 to my technology tool box and, whoa doggies, have I put it through its paces. During our summer trip across the U.S. it was our GPS, our connection with friends and family, as well as the primary way we foraged for food, gas, and lodging. With the addition of a Logitech keyboard, it’s become my primary note-taking device at conferences and in meetings. I read on it, look up (and archive) recipes, send texts, take photos, edit videos, and use its timer. Its portability and size makes it extremely useful. Interestingly, I often find myself touching the screen of my laptop, expecting it to respond to my finger.

Chimera Cosmos and Spiral Theas

An ever-deepening understanding of online, 3D, virtual worlds.  With my friend and travel guide, Liz Dorland, I got to know many new virtual worlds – exploring, touring, meeting new people, and trying new adventures.  These are crazy, weird and wonderful places with all kinds of learning going on. I am certain we’ll all be shopping, learning, browsing, and interacting in online virtual  worlds in the not-too-far-distant future. If you haven’t yet explored a virtual world (e.g. Kitely, OpenSim, Jibe, Second Life), set that as a 2013 treat for yourself.  It’ll stretch you in ways you can’t imagine.

Women in Control participants

If our WIC patients can do it, anyone can. In 2012 we concluded a health promotion research project with Boston Medical Center called Women in Control (WIC).  This project examined the efficacy of using virtual worlds for patient education and healthcare behavior support (earlier blog post).  What I learned from that experience could fill a hard drive, but here are the most important learning highlights: the intractable nature of type 2 diabetes, the power of virtual spaces for group support sessions, and the resilience of the women in this study.  Our WIC patients were 40-60 year-old women with raging type 2 diabetes and low literacy who had rarely (if ever) touched a computer before they enrolled in our study.  And there they were, teleporting around, chatting, and dancing in virtual space as avatars; rolling with the complexities and figuring it out. It was a delight to observe their learning and the way that mastering such a complex environment gave them confidence and new-found personal power.

The importance of documenting and publishing your work. Through the work we did at BMC and the strong leadership of Dr. John Wiecha,  Dr. Suzanne Mitchell, and Dr. Milagros Rosal, I learned the importance of documenting what you’re doing along the way, and then reflecting on that as a learning path. As we planned the various projects we simultaneously planned the documentation. I learned to think in terms of what artifacts, recordings, measurements, and documents we would need in order to evaluate our progress, make adjustments along the way, and then thoughtfully, precisely, and usefully share what we learned. And we now have an impressive portfolio of published articles, sound recordings, photo logs, blog posts, and magazine features that explain the project and the results, a vivid record of what we all learned together.

Marjorie Williams and Markets of Paris

Amplify your signal and build community via the network effect.  I know, I know, it’s a familiar riff, but one I can never get enough of it.  My friend Marjorie R. Williams co-authored a book called Markets of Paris, 2e this year.  It’s a good book (a very good book) but she made it even better by launching, and then grooming, an impressive online presence to compliment the book.  Her website, blog, Facebook page, Pintrest board, and Twitter stream not only allowed her to post updates, additions, and supplemental information but it gave her readers the chance to join in community, share their experiences, provide suggestions, correct items in the book, and enhance everyone’s enjoyment of Paris’s markets. So nicely done.

Al Filreis and the Mod Po team

The reach and impact of massive, open, online education (MOOCs).  In the fall I took an online Modern and Contemporary American Poetry course taught by Dr. Al Filreis and a phalanx of graduate students at University of Pennsylvania (via Coursera).  It was a terrific learning experience (summary blog post) and a breath of fresh air to confirm that innovation is alive and well in higher education. The speed with which some of our greatest institutions have jumped on the online learning bus and urged faculty to create courses is impressive.  Of course, we have a long way to go and not all MOOCs are exemplars, but these are interesting times.

Hope for improving education from within. Gardner Campbell, George Siemens, Alan Levine, Cathy Davidson, David Knuffke, Nancy White, Bonnie Stewart…whether they knew it or not, they have all been valued guides for me this year. I’ve watched and listened to them participate in online communities, networked seminars, discussion groups and forums, and soaked up their blogs.  They are all intensely committed to improving education and they all walk their talk from within – advising, guiding, suggesting – while they practice.  As Gardner Campbell says in a recent blog post of his, “I’m convinced that we can find that rich soil beneath the pavement…and demonstrate that those brave flowers knew something afterall.”

Beginner’s mind?

The value of beginner’s mind. Perhaps the most significant of my lessons learned in 2012 is the importance of remembering the click and whir of the beginner’s mind.  We moved from Massachusetts to California this year – put all our stuff in a moving van and moved to a new home and a new neighborhood.  With the million and one small connections that make up daily life cut asunder, we began the process of figuring it out and rebuilding.  Where’s the post office, how does the parking work, where should the cereal boxes go, what day is trash pick-up, what’s the shortest route to the freeway? Each day I woke up with a long list of things to figure out and mental maps to construct. There are so many options and possible paths when you lack knowledge, as opposed to the carefully honed path of the expert. It was exciting, but it was also exhausting.  I was working hard and felt frustrated over my mind’s inability to suck up information, store, and retrieve it quickly enough. I want to hold tight to those feelings and remember them well the next time I’m building a learning experience for someone else.

Reflections on #ModPo

Al Filreis and graduate students in a ModPo video.

The Modern and Contemporary American Poetry MOOC has drawn to a close. Papers are in, last discussions have ended, and the organizers have surveyed the participants. Time for a little reflection on the experience. As background, I enrolled in ModPo – a massively open online course (MOOC) offered by Coursera and taught be Dr. Al Filreis (University of Pennsylvania) in the fall. Here is the blog entry I wrote at the start of the course.

Overall, it was a positive experience. I learned a lot about American poetry. The content was rich, the course was extremely well-organized and executed, and the organizers made the most of participatory media tools they selected (video, discussion boards, Twitter, Google Hangouts, podcasts, and blogs) to draw us in and get us thinking. Here’s a (rather shaky, sorry) home video, shot by Al Filreis, at the end-of-course party held at the Kelly Writer House (where he is based) on campus at Penn. Apparently, participants who lived within driving distance came for the event to join Filreis and his graduate students to raise a glass and reflect on the course. Some real love here.

Falling by the wayside.

So, that’s the good part. The not so good part? Well, first off, I didn’t finish the course. My bad – but that fact deserves some examination. Like many who enroll in these massive online courses, I fell by the wayside. I was struck by the figures mapped out in this bark from CogDog. In his post, Alan Levine recounts his experience taking a Social Network Analysis MOOC. Two tenths of a percent of those originally registered in his course completed it.  I don’t know what the ModPo numbers are, but it’s probably close.  From where I sit, the drop-off problem has two roots.  First, there are no repercussions for the participant if s/he falls behind – I haven’t paid anything for the course, since I’m not working toward a degree I don’t have that fire in my belly, there’s no one there to notice if I don’t show up, and I don’t disappoint anyone (but me) when I don’t keep up.  Of course, all of that is a personal thing with the learner.  The more intractable problem, and the one that Alan focused on in his post, is that the course proceeds along at its own rate – not at my pace. There is no wiggle room for me and the rest of my life.  My ModPo completion problem began with an extended trip in the middle of the ten-week course.  Even though I had internet access on my trip, travel being what it is, I fell behind.  And once I fell behind, it was a downward spiral.  I couldn’t submit the assignments.  The live synchronous sessions were impossible to follow without the readings.  My pals in the Facebook group and on Twitter were referencing things I didn’t understand.  As Alan points out, surely one of the primo affordances of online learning is the ability to flex time and make it work for busy lives.

The ModPo-ers who submitted the four required writing assignments, peer reviews, and completed the quizzes will all receive a Coursera certificate of completion. There were no grades in this course – the focus was on effort, peer review, and discussion. I’m not sure how many certificates were awarded, but as soon as I find out, I’ll post it here.

But here’s the other thing. The amount and level of participant interaction.  What George Siemens refers to as a distinction between xMOOCs and cMOOCs.  The former, xMOOCs, mimic the structure, cadence, and methods of a traditional course (lecture, quizzes, etc) whereas the later, the cMOOC, leverages the connectedness of the participants (see one of many meaty posts on George Siemen’s blog).  While the ModPo organizers did a very good job with video [particularly in the live synchronous sessions where the Twitter steam and an 800 number (!) were used to foster participation] and there were discussion boards (unwieldy and unmanageable) and assignments, the main elements of the course – where the action took place – were familiar territory for a college course: read, listen, watch.  The most effective (for me) community elements sprung up on Facebook and with a friend who was also taking the course. That action sprouted up organically, outside of the course’s formal structure.

Connectivism

What George Siemens (and others) encourage is a more connected experience. An emphasis on knowledge creation, rather than knowledge transmission.  Courses that emphasize authentic assessment models where students demonstrate their understanding and skills through the products they produce and courses with distributed, multi-spaced interactions. ModPo was a fabulous beginning.  I swoon over the impact that it will have as the incredible Al Filreis and his creative team evolve the pedagogy, leverage newer and better tools, and tap into the vision of a more connected model.

It’s amazing, when you think on it, how far we’ve come.  Afterall, MOOCs have only been a thing since 2008 – with the Siemens and Downs first MOOC – CCK08.  And now we have many major universities offering MOOCs, two new companies (Coursera and Udacity in 2011) providing 100′s of MOOCS for all, and enough press coverage to choke a horse. I completely agree with Ryan Tracey on his well done blog post on the Future of MOOCs  - MOOCs are here to stay and their impact on education will be felt by all.

Alameda Point

Alameda Point – Alameda, California

We recently moved to Alameda, California where we are now settling in and learning about the history of our new home.  The town of Alameda is actually an island, just east of San Francisco, nestled next to Oakland in the San Francisco Bay.  One of the more fascinating aspects of our island’s history is an area on the west end called Alameda Point – a 918 acre site which, for 57 years, a humming Naval base.

But the story of Alameda Point begins earlier.  Athough an island now, Alameda was once on a peninsula. In the early 1900′s an estuary was dredged through and the peninsula of Alameda became the island of Alameda. The industries that sprouted up on the island – a borax company, coal-to-gas plants, and an oil refinery – added contaminates to the excavated dredge material which was mostly dumped on the western side of the island.

Alameda Naval Air Station

In 1936 the Navy purchased that western landfill from the City of Alameda and commissioned a Naval Air Station there in 1940. Over time, further tidelands and sloughs were filled and the Air Station’s acreage grew. By the time World War II was underway, there was a combined military and civilian force on the base of 18,000 people, as well as many local civilians employed there.  The station included two runways, two helicopter pads, a control tower, airplane hangars, seaplane hangars, an aircraft carrier berthing pier, as well as acres and acres of very large service buildings and storage facilities. Aircraft were manufactured and repaired on the base and training programs for radar operators took place here. Nuclear powered aircraft carriers were home-ported at Alameda into the 1990s. Here is an aerial map with clickable information, to give you a feel for the place.

The Pan Am China Clipper hangar.

Pan American World Airways used the Alameda yacht harbor as the California terminal for China Clipper trans-Pacific flights beginning in 1935.  The China Clipper terminal is still there at Alameda Point, and is designated a California Historical Landmark. There are two museums on the Point – the Alameda Naval Air Museum and the decommissioned aircraft carrier, the USS Hornet.  The Hornet was an active participant in WWII and the Vietnam War and acted as the recovery ship for NASA’s Apollo 11 and 12.  You can tour the ship and see the collection of fighters and helicopters on deck, as well as the museum inside.

The Navy closed the base on April 25, 1997.  The City of Alameda purchased the land in 2000 and its been in a sort of developmental limbo ever since.  In 1999, NAS Alameda was listed as a Superfund cleanup site with 25 locations on the base identified as needing remediation (mostly for PCB contamination).

The buildings are still there and anyone can go out to visit.  There is a real ghost town feeling to it, as you can see in the photos below. Boarded up windows, peeling paint, weeds sprouting, and concrete crumbling.  But there is also a military neatness to it all, not to mention a remnant sense of the humming, thriving work that went on here not so long ago.  As I ride through on my bike, I feel like if I listened closely enough, I could hear the grind of engines and the hum of workers toiling away inside the immense hangers.

I don’t know what it is that fascinates me about the place – but it does.  Maybe it’s the sheer scale of it – a testimony to the power of human endeavor and engineering?  Or maybe it’s the fact that it’s abandoned – it reminds me of one of those Twilight Zone episodes when the hero comes up on a deserted setting, with everything left in place, as if all the occupants were suddenly vaporized, leaving behind their half-finished cups of coffee and their still smoldering cigarettes?  Or maybe it’s a bit of wabi sabi – the Japanese aesthetic over the beauty in ruin and rust?

Old guard station at entrance.

The Pan Am China Clipper hangar.

The Commisary

A church.

Learning to Exit Well

At the end of this summer we will move from New England, where we’ve lived for ten years, to California.  Anticipating the departure, I’ve become preoccupied with leave-taking. Departures. Farewells. Exits.

It started, of course, with conversations with the friends we will leave behind. Their touching sadness over our departure and the natural observations that flow from there (will this be someone with whom I will stay in touch?  how close are we really?). Leave-taking from different organizations was the next thing on my radar – professional connections, our local Unitarian church, my book group, and the homeless shelter organization I’d worked with for the last five years. With these, the conversation was more complex – navigating a myriad of personal relations (all at different levels of intimacy) as well as obligations, projects, and plans left incomplete.

Exit, pursued by bear

All of these farewells began to add up in a way that felt heavy and overwhelming. I found myself wishing that we could just get on with it and put the exit behind me…sort of like the famous Shakespeare stage direction in The Winter’s Tale….exit, pursued by bear – a marker that unfortunately presages one of the character’s off-stage death. I was definitely feeling put upon and began entertaining regrets.

Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot, a Harvard sociologist, recently published a book called “Exits” in which she puts forth the premise that we don’t pay sufficient attention to life’s exits; divorces, terminations, moves, immigrations…In our culture, these are all viewed as transitions to be gotten through as quickly as possible. Slinking off into the night, quietly departing, and moving onto the beginning that awaits you. In fact, says Lawrence, we seem to intentionally ignore our exits in favor of the hopeful beginnings with which we are so in love. Fresh start, new day, clean slate.

After reading Lawrence’s book, I came to realize that I needed to pay more attention and not rush through our exit. It would be wise to be more careful, more intentional about all of this. And, so, in that spirit, here are a few things I’m working on…

- To more fully anticipate our departure so that I can take my leave with some grace and, well,… ‘thoughtiness’. For me that’s meant not racing to the finish line, pausing to reflect, and making time for favorite last visits and venues.

- To think carefully about the way I explain our plans to people.  Since the decisions around one’s exit might not match the decisions of others, it feels important not to explain too much; to leave room for the paths that others are taking. A few years ago, I remember a colleague of mine, going on and on about how extremely glad he was to be leaving his position at the company we were all still working for.  How thrilled he was to finally get “out”! Nasty feeling, that.

- Express my gratitude to those who’ve been a support, a friend, an influence on me.  Just creating that list was helpful, and then reaching out to them and being specific about my gratitude has been a real eye opener.

- To add our leave-taking to my map as a necessary and preparatory key to progress on the path ahead.

- Give myself time to allow this transition to loan me new understanding.  It seems to me that the change afoot can be a lens through which I might come to a fuller understanding/appreciation of other aspects of my life story.

- Leave the door open for reconnection and continuation.

It sounds like a good list – and I’m buoyed by the act of just writing it here. But it’s hard work ahead.

“Leave-Taking” by August Macke

Whew. Take a Moment.

Map of the Internet

Something happened this week that caused me to just stop and take a moment to consider what a freakin’ amazing thing the internet is.

So, here’s the situation.  We’re about to host a virtual world event in conjunction with the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Geneva Foundation for Medical Research (GFMER).  The event is one session of a many-session training course for healthcare providers around the world in sexual health and reproduction.  The participants will be tuning in from over 150 different countries, either with us in Second Life, or tuning into the live, streamed event online.

The event facilitator is Dr. Marloes Schoonheim, who is pretty freakin’ amazing herself.  She’s a demographer, researcher, and educator based in Geneva, Switzerland. Here’s her website. Here’s her blog.  And here’s her entry to the BBC My World short film competition.

We’ve been working with Marloes for a few weeks now (which has been an absolute delight), to introduce her to Second Life, pin down the content for the event, and adapt it for the unique affordances of the virtual environment.  We’re also recruiting participants to join us for the event, which will be optional.  Our first email announcement didn’t get much traction among these busy healthcare workers.  So we decided to try a different approach…

We filmed a 1-minute video “commercial” for the event, in Second Life, with Marloes’s avatar describing the plan and inviting everyone to come.  Here are the steps we took together:

1.  Drafted the script, emailed the document to Marloes.

2.  Connected via Skype to discuss.

3.  Arranged a time to meet in Second Life (6 hour time difference).

4.  Used Screenflow to video record Marloes’ avatar in the virtual world.

5.  Exported the video to MOV format and posted it to YouTube.

6.  Shared link to the video in emails to all participants in the course (in 150 countries).

Just take a moment to consider that list and the implications.  All done within 24 hours, between Boston and Geneva, without spending a nickel.  Pretty freakin’ amazing.  Here’s the video:

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.”