We are over halfway to the end of the course. How are you folks doing? If you haven't done so already, please take a moment to send me a quick story that lets me know how you are feeling about the work so far, the structure of the course, the content, really, whatever your thoughts, be they brimming with compliments or overflowing with constructive criticism. It is not too late for me to make some adjustments headed into the last half.
Week 5 and Week 6 are the last two structured and required blog and tweet weeks. Of course, I'm hopeful people will want to continue sharing their work and showing their work via those avenues. And I'm also well aware that people have already pushed themselves out of their comfort zones and are quite all set with those particular forays.
I've been thrilled with the regular tweeting from folks. It has provided me a vantage point into your understandings and opinions. Please do keep it up.
I've also been enjoying the blog posts, particularly those entries that find these sublime connections between the course texts and content, professional application and relevance, and personal experiences and memories. I would encourage people to look to the course texts even further as we go into these last two weeks of blogging -- see what ideas from Kleon, Pink and the Brothers Kelley may inform your unit plans, your artifact development, your meta-analysis. Find a great quote? Delve into the context of that quote and see what other insights wait to be discovered just out of sight.
Speaking of those bigger assessments, return to the syllabus and check the suggested due dates. If folks would like some formative feedback on their unit plans, I need those drafts/outlines by July 28th for there to be ample time to get feedback.
And final housekeeping, self assessments. Before I assess your Week 4 blogs and tweets, please self assess. I didn't make this expectation as clear as I could have before. So, moving forward, please self assess. That will be the signal to me that you are ready for me to come in and apply my lens to your work. Similarly, before I assess your artifacts, or other major assessments, please self assess them -- this way I know just what you intend for me to consider one of your artifacts. There is a place there in the assessment tracker for your self assessment. These are not due until the close of the course. I just want that expectation clarified.
Now . . . on to this week's content.
Watch this 2012 TED talk from Kirby Ferguson, documentary filmmaker of Everything's a Remix and more.
Embrace the Remix from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.
While the later third of the talk gets into legal implications of such thinking, there's a broader idea about creativity to be considered here.
Walt Disney. Stan Lee. George Lucas. Steven Spielberg. Masterful storytellers. Remixers.
Uncle Walt and his team remixed fairy tales and European children's stories into shapes more pleasing to his audiences and his medium.
Stan Lee took chunks and pieces of other heroic tales and figure, drawings and sketches of artists who worked for him, and created a universe of troubled teenage and young adult super heroes. (Actually, he co-created them. He'd work out the outline of a story, an artist -- most famously Jack Kirby -- would draw that story, and then Stan the Man added dialogue that fit in the spaces left and matches the action -- for the most part. So really, he remixed himself.)
George Lucas took the archetypal heroic journey, his loves of Japanese samurai films and World War II news reels, mashed those ideas together and ended up with Star Wars.
He got together with Steven Spielberg and the two of them just recalibrated around a love of pulp serial adventures and ended up with Indiana Jones, an amalgamation of all sorts of ideas they'd seen before, just packaged for a more modern audience and sensibility.
Consider even young adult literature. Suzanne Collins. Lord of the Flies and The Most Dangerous Game both share a great many elements of The Hunger Games, but the Japanese manga, Battle Royale, has even more in common with her initial premise. Still, there's originality within Collins' work -- it's up to critics and consumers to decide the degree to which is it is original or derivative. (And if we weren't such a litigious and commercial world, we might be more willing to just admit when we got ideas from others, rather than worried we'd have to share a piece of the profits.)
If everything is a remix, how might we teach our students how to remix responsibility, critically and with intent?
Also, if everything is a remix, how might students remix stories as a means of demonstrating understanding of the themes, characters, conflicts, and details of the original?
If everything is a remix, how do we pull out the critical elements that we found endearing about the source material, keep them recognizable enough to serve their intent, yet transform them enough to make it feel wholly original in our hands? Awesome responsibilities.
And yet one kids already take on in their day to day. They just may not realize it. Listen to any elementary school age kid retell a story they heard from someone else -- they often add new details, put things out of order, and come just a few made-up names short of a brand new story. What if we help them to do these things on purpose to tell the stories they want to tell? What does that do to their understanding and value of the source material?
And adolescents do the same thing. They are just more prone to doing so with more intention.
First Digital Storytelling Challenge of the Week
Using ____________ , remix a well-known fairy tale, myth or legend into a new work that helps students understand a key concept, understanding, or skill from your content or impact area.
Suggested Digital Storytelling Tools
Storybird
Wideo
Narrable (Does Play Nice in Chrome for Some Reason)
Google Drive Tools
Bonus challenge: Try doing the same, but using narrative poetry or narrative music instead of fairy tales, myths or legends.
Second Digital Storytelling Challenge of the Week (This One Is HARD.)
Using clips from pre-existing films that share common elements, similar plot lines, and relevance to your content, create a remix/mashup that tells a complete -- if compressed -- story. You might focus on the audio. You might focus on the visuals. You might find it possible to do both.
Alternative: Use a collection of films that share any sort of unifying commonality and create an original story.
The thinking here is showing students that to be successful in such an endeavor requires a close examination of the source material. You really need to know what is happening there to put the content to effective use.
Suggested Tools
Popcorn Maker (A very powerful tool that can do lots of neat things that we will look at in Week 6)
Wevideo
Garage Band
YouTube Editor
Analog/Digital Symbiosis
We've spent so much time talking about digital environments in this course, it can be easy to overlook the power of the analog -- drawing, writing, cutting, pasting, moving, taping, measuring, mapping, doodling -- all with our hands and paper and markers and scissors and yarn and who knows what all else.
Yet we don't have to have it one way or the other. When we start fusing the two environments, we start taking more advantage of each's unique properties.
How might we blend analog and digital experiences to create a unique storytelling experience?
How might working away from the computer enhance student creativity? And vice versa?
Third Digital Storytelling Challenge of the Week
1. Create a set of story stones.
2. After creating your stones, take a photo of each stone.
3. Upload your story stones to an online white board tool.
Padlet
Realtime Board
Sketchalot
4. Manipulate your story stones in real life to then tell a story on your whiteboard.
5. Invite another individual from class to your whiteboard and have them create their own story using your stones.
Alternative: You don't have to create stones. You could create most any small, paintable/markable object into a storytelling icon. I've got a Jenga set that is going to become a set of such this fall.
