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.

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.”

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.”

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:

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 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.

I spent some time on the plane ride home, reflecting on the experience and concluded that, overall, it was excellent. I met some very interesting new people, reconnected with old friends, heard some terrific talks, and gained quite a few new gems. Highlights for me were the Lee Rainie and Howard Rheingold keynotes (fabulous) along with the random invigorating and refreshing conversation with a stranger over coffee or in the elevator.

Sloan-C program

The sessions themselves were very good (and plenty to choose from). Despite Sloan-C’s beautifully crafted and color-coded program, I did have trouble ferreting out the worthwhile from the ho-hum.  The organizers explained that they vet the conference submissions carefully (and they receive more abstracts than they accept), but it’s tough to know from the descriptions whether or not the talk will suit your needs. Part of the problem is due to the still nascent language forms we use to describe our online work – words like “virtual”, “online world”, “interactive course design”, “learning platform”, and “cognitive presence” mean different things to different people. One suggestion for next year would be to require all presenters to create a short (30 second) video of themselves, describing their session.  These videos could be posted on the conference site so that attendees could view them, in advance, in order to assess what the session will be about.  You could think of the videos as “advertisements” for the session to come.

Our session – Active Learning in Virtual Worlds – was webcast and the organizers did a terrific job of setting that up, guiding us in advance (and there at the conference), and generally managing the technical details.  Very smooth.

One thought I had is that all three of the keynotes (Rainie, Green, and Rheingold) left me wanting more – more information, more depth, more specifics.  I wonder if the keynoters could be encouraged to bring along a lieutenant, or someone else from their organization, who could give a concurrent session or two, as follow-up, to the more macro level message provided in the keynote? For instance, if Caleb Green brought along someone from Creative Commons to give a practical, hands-on, how-to introduction to Creative Commons licenses and how they work.

The twitterverse was hopping at the conference and the twitter feed monitors in the hallways were a nice touch, but why not have a BIG twitter feed in the exhibit hall and big ballroom (where the plenaries were held and the meals eaten)?  Similarly, Twitter handles on participant name badges (and in the program participant list) would have been a nice addition. And how about a live Flickr feed (I saw a lot of attendees with pretty spif looking cameras, snapping pictures in sessions).Crowdsource the conference documentation!

How about inviting a panel of live bloggers (5 or 6 of them perhaps), specially commissioned by Sloan-C as on-the-spot reporters to give their added insight and reflection to the sessions?  For example, Eirc Kunnen, from Grand Rapids CC, did a fabulous job of blogging the conference throughout.

Thinking more about the in-flux language we all use to describe our work and hitchhiking on Howard Rheingold’s “lexicon for the course” idea, it would be useful for Sloan-C to create a lexicon wiki – specifically for the conference – where the participants actively work to clarify and codify the language we use to explain our field. By conference end, we might have something useful

If the exhibit hall vendors are a representation of the direction of things, what I saw there was… online testing solutions, online course creation partners, test proctoring services, lecture capture systems, hosting services, tutorial companies, online education tool vendors, OER creators, and educational publishers (undoubtedly a different division than the textbook groups that populate most academic conferences). I was very impressed with the way that the conference organizers worked with and showcased the vendors. The vendors make much of a conference like this one possible and their generous support of a meal here or a cocktail hour there was broadly and graciously acknowledged.  Many events (including the poster session) were held in the exhibit hall in order to increase their traffic – smart move.

While I loved the electronic poster session, the set up was a bit congested, making it tough to move from one poster presenter to another and impossible to stop and have a good conversation. While it’s smart for them all to have their work on laptops, it would have been helpful for them to also have a more easily read poster to accompany them in their spot so that you could see, at a glance, what they were all about.

On the shuttle ride to the airport, I sat near Burks Oakley – Chair of the Awards Committee and member of the Sloan-C Board of Directors. We had a delightful conversation about the conference, its history and future direction, and he listened to my small suggestions with great interest (thanks, Burks).

The ultimate personal assessment for me – would I go to the conference again in future years?  You bet.

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

Rheingold explained that, at the beginning of his teaching career, he was influenced by Neil Postman’s book Teaching as a Subversive Activity – “the questions that students ask are more important than the answers they give.” This doesn’t mean you abandon the texts, but you start with questions, and you make it collaborative.

Howard wrote an article in a 1987 issue of The Well entitled “Virtual Communities” – and thus the term was coined. The article grew into a book, by the same name. In 1995, he was asked by the NEC corporation to help them envision a university of the future. He showed us images of mock-ups he created, with the help of a graphic artist, that looked surprisingly like the profiles that people create in Facebook and MySpace.

In his teaching, Howard emphasizes social learning.  As he puts it, students are going to live and work socially and yet the methods and the literature of social learning are not being used.

H. Rheingold's Social Media Wiki

Here is Howard’s social media classroom platform (built with funding from HASTAC) which he uses to amplify the social environment for his students. The hub includes wikis, blogs, and forums (see the colored tabs at the top in the screenshot above). He’s added lesson plans for educators to help them integrate the technology into the learning – those are available in the wiki portion. With this platform he and his students can index and search through different discussion threads (advantage over Facebook).  His goal is to develop the group voice of his class (through forums), along with the individual voice of the student (with blogs).

He describes his approach to his courses as “co-teaching” – students do projects, present to peers, and collaboratively author. There’s no canon to his course, but he does want to give his students background/support research and a vocabulary with which to effectively discuss media together. To help with this, there is a “lexicon” wiki on his social media site where the students in the course work collaboratively to define the terms used in the course.  In class time, Howard projects the history page and they work on the lexicon together.

Howard explains that he always has the students in his course sit in a circle…

“There are no back rows in a circle”

The co-teaching teams within the course also make mind maps on the topics they present to each other. This enables them to see the subject matter in a non-linear and networked way. His syllabus is posted on the wiki and offered up as a prezi and a concept map – he requires students to read the syllabus in its entirety, but they can look at it in a number of ways. By doing so, he signals that it’s important to be able to look at material through different lenses.

In addition to his face-to-face teaching, Rheingold is now experimenting with online learning. He’s recently formed RheingoldU (he charges $300 for a 5-week session). His first course:  Introduction to Mind Amplifiers. He calls the students here “co-learners” – he defines the borders of the learning, but they decide from there how and where to go. Each student has a blog and they use the course wiki, along with live sessions and streamed video. He encourages the participants to do a group mind-map in the white board on the webinar platform (I’ve seen Nancy White do this as well to great effect). One of the interesting things about that exercise is that you don’t know who’s adding what – it’s a bit of magic, showing them how they can act as a collective intelligence. What Howard terms, ”Peerogogy” (you heard it here, folks, a new, catchy Rheingold-term!)

Howard has created mini-courses – learning objects on a given topic that are served up online.  Each of the mini-courses has a short video (10-15 minutes) of Howard talking, along with other resources, Delicious links (available with tabs). Here’s a sample:  A mini-course on network and social network literacy. As Howard puts it, “we have the tools available to us to “roll our own” – for free!”

He says he’s been amazed at his students’ limited social literacy. They don’t understand the rhetoric of a wiki, how you can use a forum for group discussion, how to use a blog to reflect and clarify your thinking. He sees this as a critical education priority going forward.

Howard has been working with his students on something that he calls “Infotention” (yup!  there’s another one!) – developing your attention skills, training your attention span, and learning how to use IT skills (RSS feeds, persistent news search, and dashboards) to support your attention. As Howard put it, it’s critical to use the information that’s flowing into you in a way that allows you to make faster and better decisions.  Asking yourself, for example…Ignore or attend? Open a tab for later? What are the right spatial arrangements (highest priority on the left, most frequently updated is on the top).  He tries to help his students match their attention to the tool set, to start small and cultivate habits. He also cautions that there are days we must recognize that we need to get something specific done and therefore must be mindful of how your attention is spent.  Set a goal and then regularly, through the day, ask yourself, is what I am doing now bringing me closer to my goal for the day?

He described an interesting (very low tech) activity he does with his students using  yellow, orange and red post-it notes.  A gong goes off at irregular intervals and, at that point, students write down what they were thinking about on the appropriate colored post-it notes.  Yellow if the thought was on task, orange if it tangential to the task at hand, and red if it was off task. The post-its get assembled in a common spot on the board (this could be done online as well) so that the entire class can track its collective “infotention”.

He talked about the importance of critical consumption (what Ernest Hemingway called “crap detection”).  He used the classic Martin Luther King example – search on “Martin Luther King”, note the third entry down. Go to Easywhois to find out who owns the domain and you discover that the page is owned by a white supremacist organization. Other examples like this: Free Online Pregnancy Test – enter your name, sit still while we scan you. Genetics First. Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus. He’s got a million of them.

Howard’s wrap up: Our future depends upon participation, collaboration, and network awareness. He has a new book coming out called Net Smart (published by MIT Press) which he decided to write because, with all of the marvels of the online world, there is still a lot of crap out there. We can’t really regulate this (nor would we want to), but we can improve and increase the number of people who know what they are doing so that we can properly sort through it.

After he concluded his talk, as he packed up his bag, I made my way to the front to introduce myself. While I am a long-time Rheingold fan, I had a further purpose – he has accepted an invitation to join our New Media Faculty Seminar (which meets in Second Life) in two weeks.  He was gracious and warm, shook my hand, and said he was looking forward to joining us in world.  Class act.

Howard Rheingold giving his talk at Sloan-C

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.

Creative Commons Licenses

Today’s agenda started off with a plenary address from Cable Green (Director of Global Learning, Creative Commons) , “The Obviousness of Open Policy“.  Green explains that he is interested in questioning current business models and practices. His slides are all up on slideshare.net/green, under a creative commons license (but of course).

Green gave us a rousing intro to the “open” community – the players and the philosophy….the hope that everyone, everywhere can access affordable access to training for whatever knowledge/skills they want to acquire. It’s not just free (as in free beer) but free as in “freedom” – this is critical to the academy as we take these resources, re-purpose them, improve them, and redistribute them. The internet, of course, is our free distribution network and a new mass willingness to share – an empowerment to do so is the fuel that will run it. According to Green, there 500 million items on the web with creative commons license.

He talked about rivalrous vs. non-rivalrous reources.  A rivalrous resource is one that can only be used once or is rare. But with the internet and open sharing, these basic education resources can be non-rivalrous. David Wiley (BYU and “Chief Openness Officer” with Flatworld) challenged public school teachers in Utah to replace their commercial textbooks with OER textbooks.  The teachers located the books they wanted, amended them to make them their own, they ran 2000 copies to give to the students in print for $5/book.

The commercial textbook industry really took a hit in his talk –  Green took aim at the $20 billion per year spent in the U.S. on textbooks, paid for by taxpayers. According to Green, most countries spend between 5-6% of their GDP on education, which extrapolated out across worldwide spending, comes to $2.9 trillion per year world-wide. How much of that is spent on developing courseware or purchasing textbooks?  He didn’t know….but his argument is that if we move to a simple open policy, then it will free up billions of dollars to invest differently in education.  Kind of fast and loose with the math there, I think. Textbook purchases are a small portion of the amount of money spent on education in our country, or any country.

I am a big supporter of Creative Commons but I think that demonizing the commercial publishing industry is a straw dog. Making educational materials open, affordable, and is certainly a good idea, but that alone will not solve the world’s education problems. I also think that advocates of open source education materials grossly under-estimate the amount of time, attention and care required to keep materials “accurate, current, and effective.” Speak to any textbook author about how much work is required to get those materials right – this is not trivial work. Sharing creative commons materials and asking faculty to “refine and make them their own” (as Green advises) merely shifts the responsibility and the work from the commercial publishers to the faculty members on campus.

Not only that, I think that so much focus on the cost of textbooks deflects from all of the other costs and issues that make education so expensive. We need to be talking about all of that – tuition costs, administrative costs, research costs, bricks & mortar costs, academic athletics. Using open source textbooks provides small relief to that total.

It’s as if the commercial publishing industry is a convenient enemy – a scapegoat.  Those “evil publishers” raking in the dollars (which many faculty members complain about as they gladly accept the publishers’ gratis testbanks, professional development, online animations, and videos) and locking up the copyright on their content which was incredibly expensive to create. I say, let a million flowers bloom – many schools and instructors will want to continue to use vetted, refined, commercial education products and others will want to make their own or share a creative commons product. That’s fine. Stop obsessing on commercial publishers as the bad guys and start thinking more creatively about how to make education work.

Having said that, I found him provocative and interesting and admired his passion for the subject (though I could have done without the revival-preacher tactic at the end, getting us all to chant in unison). I see tremendous strength in his recommendation to make a mental shift from “not invented here” to “proudly borrowed from there”.

After the plenary, I did a bit of grazing – bouncing from session to session.  Not very satisfying but there were so many good talks that I couldn’t help myself. I stopped in to see Rochester Institute of Technology’s use of SL to teach computer technology, listened to part of a panel discussion on for-profit colleges and their impact, and an interesting session on data visualization. I finally landed in Laura Dell’s (University of Cincinnati) session called “Design on a Dime:  Using Open Source Technologies for Online Learning“.  Terrific session – really practical and specific. Here are some of her gems:

- She goes by the “rule of one” – she will use one new technology in a given course (otherwise the course becomes about technology and not about the content) and always leaves room in the schedule for problems

- She’s finding many more of her students are doing their assignments on a mobile device (she gets more emails these days with “sent from my Blackberry” on the bottom)

- She uses Eyejot – the free version now lets you record up to 5 minutes on the free version (used to 1 minute which was why I didn’t use it – cool!).  Recordings go straight to email, recipient doesn’t have to have Eyejot account. They have an embed feature.

- She creates brief PDF instruction documents for students for the tools she uses (they like having that on paper)

- Tries to add more audio to her courses (often audio can solve the problem and it’s much easier to create than video).  She uses audio feedback in her courses (she records 2.5-3 minute feedback to students – faster and easier to give constructive feedback, also files are small, easy to email)

- She likes VoiceThread (free tool to structure group conversations around images) in place of discussion boards. She likes it because she can set up a VoiceThread and the students can choose the way they give their input on that item. You can type, you can upload a video file, you can “phone it in” (3-minute limit) and record yourself speaking. Free version but she’s opted for the pro account as she needed the added administrative functions and storage space. In the final product, each person’s feedback is represented by little boxes, framed around the main image. There’s also a VoiceThread mobile now.

One of the things I really liked about this session was Laura’s attitude toward it all – she was practical, clear-eyed, and optimistic without being a pollyanna. For example, one of the folks asked, “what do you do if a student comes to you to debate their grade and the VoiceThread or the Eyejot has been deleted?” Laura responded by saying that she tries not to focus too much on the outliers as she develops her courses and assignments.  Some students will cheat, some will complain or sabotage projects but she’s opted to concentrate on all the ways that these new tools will benefit most of the students and not get bogged down in the few that will subvert the system.  Amen, Laura.

In the afternoon I attended a great session on mobile learning.  Lots of fun playing with iPhones & iPads.  Good idea:  inject an expert into a small group of students by use of FaceTime on the iPhone. Have the expert lined up in advance, s/he talks with the students in their group via FaceTime.  The organizers of this session passed two iPads and two iPhones around the crowded session room and we were all amused over and over again, waving to each other via Face Time.  Also took a look at the Chromebook (under $400 – net appliance) and the NeuroPhone (out of Dartmouth) wireless EEG-enabled user control of an interface (whoa).

Sloane-C poster session

One final session that wasn’t all that good (so hard to tell and then, once you’re in there, seems rude to leave) and then the poster session which, true to the audience here, is an electronic poster session. High tables set up in the center of the exhibit hall with a position, marked by a QR code-adorned sign, for each poster presenter to put their laptop. I wandered through, spoke with a few of the presenters, and then back to my room to collapse.  Feeling like my head’s about to explode!

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).

For those unfamiliar with the Sloan-Consortium, they are an organization dedicated to excellence in online education and this is one of their three international/national conferences. The people here (some 1200 or so) come from higher education, K-12, business, government, healthcare, and non-profits. This year’s conference theme is Online Learning, Teaching, and Research in the New Media Ecology.

I was only able to squeeze in a few presentations this afternoon. A terrific one on student blogging with Dr. Susan Wegman – how to, rubrics, and evaluating. Here’s the prezi with some extremely intriguing data and insights. And here’s the blog post with links to the rubrics.

“The Impact of Online Learing on the Higher Education Faculty Professional identity” was a very interesting session with a researcher named Edwige Simon (CU Boulder). She conducted research with ten faculty teaching online (using Blackboard) to get inside what worked and didn’t work for them and the impact the experience had on their professional identity. Her recommendations, based on the outcomes, are that instructors making the transition to online teaching need:  an injection of outside expertise (via conferences, outside speakers), to form reading groups (exposure to research in the field), to conduct action research in their courses, and to become a member of a community of practice for support and sharing.

The keynote presentation, at the end of the day, with Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet and the American Life Project, was fabulous! Rainie did a bang-up job sharing a raft of fascinating data and he did it in such a way that you gained inferences and insight that helped you to draw conclusions without drowning in a point of view. Here is his site where you can find a description of his talk and download his slides. But here are a few gems that he shared:

There were 302.9 million wireless subscribers in America in 2010 and now, in 2011, there are 327.6 million

So, with 315 million people in America, that means that there are now more wireless subscribers than there are people!

And how’s this one:

82% of 12-17 year-olds take their cell phones with them to bed (and leave them on!)

And I think one of my favorite lines….”We live our lives in a state of continuous partial attention.”  Hmm…that one will take some mulling over.  Onward to tomorrow!

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.

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.