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.
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