UMF EDU 571 Week 2: Redefining Story & the Power of Visual Storytelling

UMF EDU 571 Summer 2014 Week 2: Redefining Story & the Power of Visual Storytelling

This week we are digging further into the core of what we mean by storytelling as well as how we can deliver meaningful, powerful stories through visual means.

I recommend the top four links on Diigo EDU 571 Summer 14 Week 2 as good places to start your thinking.  If you've gotten your hands on the course texts, Austin Kleon would treat you well as both a source of information as well as a source of inspiration -- look at how those two books are designed.

BEFORE We Get Further Into the Content for the Week . . . 

Here are some thoughts regarding the course.

The Thinking Behind Digital Storytelling Challenges for the Week

I'm adding this little heading to help clarify the intent of the weekly work.  Over the space of the course, you must identify, explore and demonstrate facility with three digital storytelling tools.  These weekly challenges serve as structured explorations to meet that goal over the space of the course.

The weekly challenges are not required -- you'll note the rubric doesn't identify them as part of your formal assessment.  They are there to give folks concrete challenges to push their thinking and to serve as examples of the sort of digital storytelling formative and summative assessments we might use in our various impact areas.

Course Design & Continuous Evolution

One challenge for me as an instructor: providing a balance of self-determination and structure to meet all of the learning styles evident in this course.  Thus, the course will bend and flex, shift and adjust with each week.  As always, ask questions.  Advocate for your needs.  Let me know what I can do to help.

Assessing Course Work, On Going Dialogue & Honoring Privacy

Expect weekly, if not more frequent, commentary on your blog and Twitter posts.   As you complete the more robust assessments, including the artifact work, expect feedback as soon as possible.

Working in a digital environment presents interesting challenges in commenting on student work.  I've found that general public praise (favoriting, retweeting, Google +1-ing,  forwarding, etc.) provides a quick thumbs up and that more specific public praise feels good -- let's folks know they are on the right track.

I've found public dialogue around ideas, pressing critical questions, pushing folks to challenge their comfort zones, may create some discomfort at first, yet yields pretty good results in terms of building understanding.

I've found constructive criticism works best in private.

Thus, I may challenge your ideas on Twitter and I may ask a question in a blog post comment.  If I feel you aren't quite hitting the mark or I'm worried about the best way to phrase a comment, I will send an e-mail.

And now, the rest of the content for this week . . . 

FIRST Digital Storytelling Challenge for the Week 

Tell a meaningful nine-image visual story that reveals something important about who you are using ________ content source and ___________ digital tool.

Suggested Content Menu
The Noun Project
Creative Commons Licensed Images
Personal Digital Photos (Why Sift Through Flickr or Google Images? Take Your Own.  Do What You Want.)
Personal Drawings (Why Take a Picture When You Can Draw Exactly What You Want?)

Suggested Digital Tool Menu
Google Drawing/Document/Presentation (Found in Google Drive)
Padlet
Real Time Board
Slideshare (In Conjunction w Keynote/PowerPoint)

Key to this challenge: Visuals only.  Only nine.  No more.  No less. Save the text.  Dig deep into the core of story.

In so doing, it can be very helpful to learn from folks who manipulate the power of image professionally: graphic designers and brand marketers.

The business world has a tremendous amount to teach us about looking at story from a less traditional point-of-view.  Dan Pink's Whole New Mind includes some fantastic insights around employing story to transform business -- one of the reasons we are reading that text.

The Diigo links for Week 2 include a variety of articles around this very notion.

I suggest starting with this one from Getty Images' brand Curve.  Look at those criteria they use for assessing powerful, compelling images and wonder how might you apply that same criteria in digital storytelling.

SECOND Digital Storytelling Challenge for the Week (This One Is a Toughie)

Share a meaningful understanding from your content area in the form of a narrative infographic.  If you haven't seen many infographics, check out http://visual.ly/ which is a fantastic archive.

Suggested Tools
PiktoChart
Infogram

Achievable Mentor Text
http://visual.ly/common-fairytale-narratives-beast-edition

Powerful & Challenging Mentor Text
http://jessandruss.us/

The key is shaping the factual information into a compelling narrative while also using simplified visuals to improve clarity and understanding.  Infographics are such a robust and challenging medium, I almost saved them for later in the course.  However, I wanted those folks who are ready to push the envelope to start thinking about such constructs as more than just ways of sharing raw data.  These graphic designs can becoming amazing hybrids of factual data and compelling story.

That's it for Week 2!  Enjoy getting into the texts -- they are are perfect source material to get your blogging thinking going.  Keep following #UMFEDU571 on Twitter as I will be posing more and more questions and ideas and resources there and using that as place for dialogue.

EDU 571 Summer 14 Week 1 Podcast

It was supposed to be a video and it was supposed to be posted last night.

Instead it is an audio file and it is being posted bright and early.

Necessity breeds these particular results.

Enjoy and here's hoping it adds some context you find helpful.

UMF EDU 571 Week 1 Podcast

Good Morning . . . Our Journey Begins . . .

Good morning all,

Welcome to University of Maine at Farmington's EDU 571 Learning & Innovating with Digital Storytelling Summer 2014 Section 001, a class I hope to be as interesting and valuable for you folks as the name is long and sometimes difficult to remember in total for me.

I'm going to record you a proper video introduction, as I intend to do at the beginning of each of our weeks together, but I thought it better to start with some

simple

     plain

          ordinary

text.

Our first week isn't so much about the digital, but more about the story.  In some ways, our class title  is shaped like a quite like a quadratic equation.

What?  Math?

Yes.

Remember FOIL?  First.  Outer.  Inner.  Last.

First: Learning Digital.   Here we are.  Online.  First day.  What you will be learning at the forefront.

Outer: Learning Storytelling.  Our focus for weeks one and two.  More emphasis on story, the fundamentals of story, and the value of using story to create, develop and demonstrate understanding.

Inner: Innovating Digital.  Our focus in weeks three and four turn to digital and what crazy keen neat things we can do with the various devices and tools at our disposal.

Last: Innovating Storytelling.  In weeks five and six we take a look at how storytelling has experienced some fundamental, and dare-I-say exciting, shifts as our culture becomes more and more digital.

See?  Math.

Another reason for the text?  I wanted you folks to have the opportunity to skim.

We all do it to varying degrees of success.  We jump to the end or to the middle; we skip ahead a few pages or realize we didn't really pay much attention to those last paragraphs and go back and read them again.  It's okay.

And video? Video is a lot harder to skim.  We miss things.  Our brains can't so easily fill in the gaps if we jump through it completely.  And jogging the playhead back to where we left off?  Without a time stamp?  Difficult.   And yes, we might do it with our DVRs, but most often, it is because we are familiar with the content, we have a sense of where things are going in this episode of Scandal and once we see Huck we pause for a sec because Huck.

Consider how this might apply to our students and why video might hold some added value as a delivery tool for content.   You might want to blog about it.

Which brings many of you to the reason you are reading this entry right now: what do you need to do for work this week?

This is orientation week.  A way for us to get to know one another, a sense of the course, a start of the tools we'll be using consistently (blogging and Twitter), and a time to get acclimated to looking at learning and understanding through the lens of story and narrative.

I'm going to list the things you need to do because a) lists keep me organized and b) if you are skimming this, you know that lists are sign posts for the most important stuff.

Consider how adding some lists and graphics of those lists to a content video could make skimming more effective for your users while more assuring for you as the facilitator.

1) Take a look at the rubrics along the right hand column of this blog.    Each assessment has its own page.  All of the rubrics for all of our assignments are published now.  Feel free to work on whatever assessments you as soon as you like.

To help you with the unit plan, artifact and meta-analysis, I have compiled a series of resources to help you with Mishra and Koehler's TPACK model of tech integration as well as Puentedura's SAMR model.

2) Set Up Your Blog and Getting Thinking Out Loud.  Use whatever platform will work best for you moving forward from here.  Consider application to your impact area.  For example, it would be foolhardy of me to use Tumblr to keep an EDU 571 blog, because Tumblr is blocked at Mt. Blue Campus and I want my work accessible.  Blogger is a fantastic choice because it is part of Google Apps for Education and our building is all in with GAFE.  Edublogs, WordPress, xyz platform, all are fine. Send me the link to your blog as soon as possible.
NOTE: Be certain you sending a link to your blog's URL and not to the editing screen or dashboard of your blog.

3) Set Up Your Tweet and Get Tweeting/Retweeting.   Access your  account, if you have one, or consider starting a new one that you could see yourself using into the future as your professional identity on Twitter.  Be certain to include the hashtag #UMFEDU571 in your tweets for class so we can easily converse and network both within and outside the class.  And send me a link to your profile on Twitter.

4) Take a look at the materials on our Diigo list for the week 1.   If you like, go ahead and pour through the big list.  It will be evolving throughout the course.

5) Introduce yourself to the rest of the class by completing the following two tasks and posting the results on your blog.  (These count as two of your blog posts for the week.)

a) Who Are You?  We are about to go on a quest, a journey over these next few weeks.  It helps to know one another.  Of course we could go Canterbury about this, which could be very cool if quite involved.  Or we could borrow from another rich tradition: role-playing games.

Consider how you would describe yourself if you were to be categorized as one does an orc or an elf in Dungeons & Dragons, World of Warcraft or most any roleplaying game regardless its context.  Then build your profile.

You might use an RPG character generator to help you think about categories/descriptors to consider.  Abilities, description, alignment (good/evil, etc.)  There are many free apps for handheld devices and many sites such as this one and this one that you may find useful.

The point here is not to imagine yourself as a cleric or ranger or whatnot, but rather to gamify or storify yourself a bit and consider yourself a character full of stats and abilities about to play or travel through a quest with a party of colleagues and fellow adventurers at  your side.

b) Tell a Six Word Memoir from the last two weeks of your life to practice the fundamentals of story.

Hold your Six Word Memoir up to the 22 Tips from PIXAR and see how well you've done heeding that collection of advice.

Then, add meaning to that memoir by using only font, size, placement and alignment to create meaning and added value for your reader.  I created the below using Google docs, adding some of their Google fonts, and then taking a screenshot to post here on the blog.  Use whatever digital tools speak to you.

That does it for now.  There will be a video up later in the day.

Ahh . . . last thing.  Please send an email to danryder207 at Gmail and let me know your preferred e-mail address.