Teaching and Storytellin g with Web 2.0: The state of the art, and on a budget, too Bryan Alexander, NITLE Educause ‘09
Sep 03, 2014
Teaching and Storytelling
with Web 2.0:The state of
the art, and on a budget, too
Bryan Alexander,NITLE
Educause ‘09
How to use today’s sessionWe consider:• Low- or no-cost
tools• Practical
pedagogies
• Concepts to build upon
• A spectrum of project sizes
The slide of no work“How does this stuff impact me, if I don’t
plan on making or helping make anything?”
• Object of academic study• A growing body of stories being
consumed and co-created• Influence on other areas: news,
publishing, entertainment, infotainment• New media platforms emerging, driven
by storytelling needs and possibilities
An emergent set of storytelling practices, growing out of Web 2.0 technologies and cultural forms.
What's web 2.0 about?
Quick recap• Microcont
ent• Social
software• Perpetual
beta
What's web 2.0 about?
Quick recap• Multiply
authored content– within
content– located
externally• Boundaries can
be hard to find
But wait, what's storytelling?
“The last man on Earth sat alone in a room.”
But wait, what's storytelling?
“The last man on Earth sat alone in a room.
There was a knock on the door.” (Fredric Brown, “Knock”, 1948)
The pull of mystery, sometimes“It was a bright cold day in April, and the
clocks were striking thirteen.”
“Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. “
“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
Or Freytag, sometimes
• Delight and instruct
Or the personal, sometimes
• Delight and instructStories are:• About someone
important• About an
important event
• About what one does
From the CDS Cookbookhttp://www.storycenter.org/cookbook.html
But wait, what's storytelling?
Exercise one: what isn’t storytelling?
Use whatever communication tools you like. Except smoke signals.
• Dictionary• Difference
between event and story
• Silence• Disconnected
images and ideas• Lack of personal
engagement
• Information with no purpose
• Is it a story if no-one’s listening
• Lack of imagination
• Or poaching
What came before Web 2.0 storytelling?
Web 1.0 storytelling, of course
•Hypertext•Multimedia•Evanescent
•Browser-focused
•Connected with offline, analog content (textbooks)
Web 1.0 storytellingExample:
Dreaming Methods (2000ff)
http://www.dreamingmethods.com/
Example: “Ted’s Caving Journal” (circa 2001)
(one copy, from http://www.angelfire.com/trek/caver/page1.html)
Features:• Multilinear• Multimedia• Browserish• Serial
structure
Web 1.0 era storytellingEmail chain
letters, jokes• Social• Boundaries
fuzzy• Microcontent• Virtual
community facilitation (1980s on)(Snopes.com)
(http://www.thenation.com/blogs/jstreet/363133/bailout_satire)
Dear American:
I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.
I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.
I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.
This is a matter of great urgency…
Digital storytelling roots• Digital Storytelling movement (CDS)
Digital Storytelling at Ukaiah, 2006
Digital storytelling offshootsEducational
projects growing
• Community
• Curricula • Support
(http://connect.educause.edu/Library/Abstract/StorytellingintheAgeofthe/42327)
So why Web 2.0 storytelling?It’s already being done.
http://delicious.com/tag/web2storytelling
Focused platforms• Character (Twitter,
blog, MySpace, audio)
• Setting (wiki, images, audio (Myna, Freesound))
• Objects (images, video)
• Events (blog, podcast)
More multimedia platforms•VoiceThread•Video (Jaycut, Windows Moviemaker)
•Gaming [Venatio Creo+Inform 7; Game Editor, Novashell, Sandbox, and Scirra Construct]
She's a Flight Risk http://esquire.com/features/articles/2003/030922_mfe_isabella_1.html
Blog as story diary
Bookblogginghttp://www.pulsethebook.com/ - “networked
book” (Institute for the Future of the Book)
Publishing new content, in development
Rebookblogging?
Republication of pre-existing content• Pedagogy• Social feedback• Publicity
• Pepys Diary• Dracula Blogged• Ulysses and da Vinci per day
(http://hdt.typepad.com/henrys_blog/)
(http://spoonriver.metblogs.com/)
Creative writing in response to document:•Spoon River Metblog
Platforms Blogosphere and nonfiction character“As one day’s posts build on points
raised or refuted in a previous day’s, readers must actively engage the process of “discovering” the author, and of parsing from fragment after fragment who is speaking to them, and why, and from where whether geographically, mentally, politically, or otherwise.”
-Steve Himmer, “The Labyrinth Unbound” (2003)
Platforms Blogosphere and nonfiction character“As one day’s posts build on points
raised or refuted in a previous day’s, readers must actively engage the process of “discovering” the author, and of parsing from fragment after fragment who is speaking to them, and why, and from where whether geographically, mentally, politically, or otherwise.”
-Steve Himmer, “The Labyrinth Unbound” (2003)
MicrobloglosphereTwitter: a
single narrative
• Good Captain
http://twitter.com/goodcaptain
http://loose-fish.com/
http://twitter.com/oscarwilde
WikistorytellingThe Penguin novel
(http://www.amillionpenguins.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page)
Wikistorytelling
Can a collective create a believable fictional voice? How does a plot find any sort of coherent trajectory when different people have a different idea about how a story should end – or even begin? And, perhaps most importantly, can writers really leave their egos at the door?
“About”,http://www.amillionpenguins.com/wiki/index.php/About
Flickr and storytelling
• Tell a story in 5 frames group
“The Chase” (Benjamin!, 2009)
http://flickr.com/groups/visualstory/discuss/72157611666013264/
Flickr and storytelling
• In the Tell a story in 5 frames group, 'Alone With The Sand'
(moliere1331, 2005)
Social photo storiesExample:
« Farm to Food », Eli the Bearded (2008)
Social photo stories
Social photo stories
Social photo stories
Flickr, Tell A Story in Five Frames group (http://www.flickr.com/groups/visualstory/)
Example: "Food to Farm", Eli the Bearded (2008)
Social photo stories
Example: "Food to Farm", Eli the Bearded (2008)
Social photo storiesPedagogies:• Remix• Archive
work• Social
presentation
• Visual literacy(http://www.flickr.com/groups/visualstory/discuss/72157603786255599/;
http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/ )
Social slidesBarbara
Ganley, “Into the Storm” (2007)
(http://www.slideshare.net/bgblogging/intothestormhttp://bgexperiments.wordpress.com/2007/07/13/into-the-storm/ )
Embedded within Slideshare Web platform apparatus
Embedded within blog
Storytelling by podcast
The Yellow Sheet, by Librivox team (2007)
• Text then podcast• http://librivox.org/
the-yellow-sheet-by-librivox-volunteers/
• More: Podiobooks, http://www.podiobooks.com/
Web video storytelling
Connect with I (http://www.connectwithi.com/)
• Serial video• Fan content• Physical
content
lonelygirl15 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonelygirl15)
• YouTube serial video content• Local fan content• Distributed response• Hoax plot
StorytellersterMySpace, Facebook as platform• Example: Silver Ladder
(Two of Clubs character on Myspace)
Multiplicity of platforms
New forms combining categories into one?
Multiplicity of platformsNew forms combining categories into one?
Voicethread
Storybox (http://www.story-box.co.uk/index.php)
Multiplicity of platformsNew forms
combining categories into one?
Jaycut, web-based video editing
• Remember: video can be multimedia
Multiplicity of platforms
http://wetellstories.co.uk/stories/week2/
Twitter feeds, blogs (different platforms), MySpace, maps
“Slice”, from We Tell Stories anthology, Penguin (2008)
How to experience a Web 2.0 story
• A Web page in a browser– Easy or difficult to parse (Web design,
also story style)– Effect of images (visual rhetoric)– “about”– …consider this close reading
• On mobile device (phone, e-reader, game player, mp3 player)
How to experience a Web 2.0 storyBreakdown:• Tags• Social media hooks• Comments• Links to other content
How to experience a Web 2.0 story
• In RSS reader
Podcasts
So why Web 2.0 storytelling?It’s a light but functional form of social gaming.
Eve Online, from site
• Persistent world
• Distributed players
• Distributed knowledge
• Very low cost
• Some portability
Example: social Twitter storytelling: retelling The War of the Worlds
Described http://infocult.typepad.com/infocult/2008/08/alien-
invasion-via-twitter.html
A certain loss of control
Exercise three: edit someone else’s wiki page. Pick the group after you in the alphabet.
Social storytelling is user-generated content… which means some other user’s content next to yours. Which, like too much of a good thing, can be wonderful.
Alternate reality games
• Permeability of game boundary (space and time)
• Focus on distributed, collaborative cognition
• Increased ephemerality
(Perplex City, 2003-2006)
So why Web 2.0 storytelling, again?
Political ARG
(World Without Oil, May 2007)
ARG pedagogy• Creation for
constructivism• Information literacy• Object of study
(Nine Inch Nails game, 2007)
Practices and principlesTime• Wilkie
Collins: "Make 'em cry, make 'em laugh, make 'em wait"
• keep it coming (cf ask a Ninja)
• Big time: serial
• Little time: accretive
Easy to start
Writing prompt (and not necessarily text)•Use social media content, or not•Publish socially, or not
Web 2.0 is a brainstorming tool, a starting story service, a platform for quickly getting into the thing.
Practices and principles
Character• You: persona• Creative or historical character• Blog as character (Kathleen
Fitzpatrick)• Twitter as character (Eric Rice)
Practices and principles
Setting
• Maps, images, wiki, video, sounds
• External link, embededed, or ambient
How to serialize
• Introduction: station id• Recap• Where to cut? Complete bit, or mid-
stream• Sequence: linear or other• Outro: hook; logistics
Practices and principles
Chunking out lexia• Recap/summary of
story• Cliffhanger • Internal organizing
statement• Discrete argument
point
Arranging the pieces• POV• Timeline• Embedded story• Meta, help,
disclaimer
(And they move without you.)
The slide of no work
How does this stuff impact me, if I don’t make or help make anything?
• Academic study• Growing body of stories• Influence on other areas: news,
publishing, entertainment, infotainment
• New platforms emerging
Futures Stories about Web 2.0 storytelling
• Ken Macleod, The Execution Channel (2008)
(http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/15-07/local)
-Bruce Sterling, Wired, 2007
Already used for humor
http://www.much-ado.net/austenbook/
FuturesCopyright• Web 2.0 accelerates opportunities
for copyright practices, from fair use (quotes, snippets) to infringement (copying whole texts)
• Emerging practices: snippet+link, Wikipedia notice
• Other practices: using TEACH, Creative Commons
FuturesMobile devices -> "interstitial fiction”?“it can be fiction or nonfiction, but it is
unlikely to be a single isolated five-minute item, as it would be hard to market or to find such an item. More likely short items will be strung together in an anthology; the thesis of the anthology ("brief bursts about the new administration"; "101 short poems about transistors and current") will suffuse each item with a sense of being part of a whole.”
Joseph Esposito, http://toc.oreilly.com/2008/12/interstitial-publishing.html
The ultimate linkshttp://
web2storytelling.wikispaces.com/
and
http://delicious.com/tag/web2storytelling
The ultimate linksBryan Alexander and Alan Levine,
"Web 2.0 Storytelling: Emergence of a New Genre“
EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 43, no. 6 (November/December 2008)
http://www.educause.edu/library/erm0865
The ultimate linksLiberal Education Tomorrow
http://blogs.nitle.org/let
Bryan on Twitterhttp://twitter.com/BryanAlexander
NITLEhttp://nitle.org