digital storytelling – DS106 on the couch

Tag: digital storytelling

My grandmother’s hat

I was going to call this post ‘The improvisational And’ but I thought above was much more #DS106 mysterious…

We have been dealing with the serious matter of #sockgate on DS106 over the last few days. Check the hashtag on Twitter and also listen to @Scottlo ‘s second podcast if you have a need for background.

This reflection post is my attempt to pull together some ideas about what makes ‘storytelling in the wild’ work (or not) under the #DS106 hashtag.

Scott’s podcast explores what it has been like for him to come back into DS106 after not being around for a while. The podcast is not self-referential. Scott uses his experience to wonder what it may be like for somebody coming in new to DS106 and who may just be doing Daily Creates, for example. He suggests that may be those of us who have been around for a while may have a lesson to learn when we ‘bring back to life’ stories from the past – the essence of his inquiry is: are we making some people feel excluded? Alan’s is clear in his response to Scott in the comments:

If it looks like other people are having fun in ds106, and you want to have fun, well jump in the game, or ask someone. I don’t have much sympathy for people who sit on the sidelines and cry about being left out. I’m having too much fun in the mix.

So there are two views on one experience highlighting different elements. One that suggests certain ‘in jokes’ may be excluding and one that says ‘if you want to join in and don’t understand, just ask us.’ We cannot know how everyone who joins DS106 will feel. I can say that when I joined, it never felt excluding. If I did not know, I asked or googled and then joined in. Easy. But it is a personal thing, some people may need more context. Yes, I would say the clue is in the title: Digital Storytelling.

I often talk about DS106 and its ‘oral tradition of storytelling’ and the socks are a great example of that. Since DS106 started there have been many stories told by many different people. The stories evolve over time, they appear and reappear. If you are new to this game, it can seem excluding and a game that only who were ‘there’ can play – playfully expressed by @dogtrax

Kathy Onarheim finds other stories in the DS106 oral tradition,

“There is something with hedgehogs – not sure what the story is – but they show up now and again and cause some conversation…kinda like socks….you don’t need to know the original story – just jump on and weave the next chapter…. I see @mdvfunes drawing hedge hogs and @annycow tweeting about them and even @mburtis in this snuggle with one…has to be stories here somewhere!”

“You do not need to know the original story, just jump in and start weaving.” And we can certainly weave: Dolls, paper bags for president, time travelling motorcycles, transporter tree houses, fake families, sock fraud, student revolutions and on and on…

In DS106 we do different type of stories. Some are neatly packaged in a video or in a radio show, others are improvisational in nature and evolve over time. The clue is in the title – this is about storytelling. When you do a formal run of the course or run through the open course, there is whole module on ‘weaving stories on the web’. It is just digital improvisation, we make up characters and places and events and run with them. Just like #sockgate. Sure, it makes more sense to those who were ‘there’ but we can all jump in and weave, as Kathy says.

It seems to me that what may help new people who are uncertain about improvisational storytelling online is the same thing that helps us learn how to improvise elsewhere: My grandmother’s hat. Now go back and read the story at the start of this post. It is and excerpt from Piers Ibbotson’s book. In improvisational theatre this is called the ‘Yes, and’ game. It is the only way the telling of a spontaneous story between people can work. At least I trust the father of improvisational theatre Keith Johnstone on that. Archive.org has the full original text if you want to learn more. He describes the process as ‘blocking or accepting’ – if we block, the story dies; if we accept, it gets told. He does say that the same is true in life, but I will not digress now.

In this context, we block when we stop ourselves from joining in because we do not know what went on before today. We accept when we say: Sock Fraud? I can do that. I want the socks you promised us, Jim. Or, there were never any socks! Or, you are all a bunch of ‘sockists’! Or….

Yes, this is true and what is also true is…See how it works? Facts are not relevant, we build on what is being spoken (or tweeted) as we go.

So for the record I want to remind everyone that:

…but maybe, just maybe, Jim ‘the Impresario from the Web Hosting racket’ (listen to Scottlo on this – linked above) is plotting his next sock move with Gardner at the Italian Gelateria Pingu in Via Sant’Anna…

Just a little story about serendipitous connections on Twitter around another daily create. I wrote about this the other day and this is the story told for cogdogblog and his stories of open sharing.

Behind the scenes

Hmmm… Don’t ask.

It was going to be my first black background video. It was not to be. I learnt that making video with back background that do not make one look like a ghost is just plain difficult. I then tried Touchcast on the iPad. Well, I should know better. I am sure the app is cool once you learn to use it but

So I decided the ‘easy’ way would be to create it in Animoto.

I have made one other video sucessfully on Animoto, but have tried several that #bigfail. It is not a transparent platform it has many rules that are there to encourage you to upgrade and you often get stuck after you have gone to far into your project to ditch it. I refuse to collude with dishonest commercial behaviour so I ditch the project rather than be forced to pay. I have an education account, you would think they would behave transparently, they do not.

This time i worked out all their rules. Clip length, audio length, number of songs (1), free theme, total length of video allowed, maximum size, size of photos…. and I am not kidding!

The damn editor still cut my soundtrack by 2 seconds. I could not get around the problem in their editor. I think it has something to do with the addition of their logo at the end but i was not going to be forced into another way of paying to test that out. I rendered the video with faulty sound track and downloaded it.

I then brought it into iMovie and edited it. Detach soundtrack, add new on, shift a few clips to make it flow, add titles and a little music. Bob is your uncle, as we say in the UK. Done.

What is annoying is that it has a lot of potential. Animoto that is. If only they gave clear free options and then offered upgrades. They even try to force you to upgrade for better quality video download. If I wanted that I would have asked for that when I signed up!

Come back One True Media! That was a fast and easy way to produce video, and I did not mind paying them. They still went to the island of dead tools…go figure.

(Source: https://player.vimeo.com/)

Testing Sway for Daily Create

August 6, 2015 / DS106 on the couch / 0 Comments

Today’s daily create asked us to create calming collage. At the same time I saw a tweet from David Kernohan about Sway. A tool to create interactive digital stories from Microsoft. I thought I could make me collage this way to try it.

This shrink is not impressed. I could not preview video in the editor, add music or gifs (though I did not try to upload any of mine). You have little by way of customisation but can tell the system how much stuff matters through the use of focus points and level of importance as it formats. Fonts are very limited.

What is nice? If you just use their content the pre-sort and tags (with hyperlink if you click the image) creative commons content for you. Now this is a winning feature for those of us in a hurry or too lazy to attribute. You can choose how the interactive story is viewed: one page down, one page sideways, one item at a time. You can edit easily within the limits of the tool, all devices friendly helps. It seems, though I did not test, that you can have more than one authors.

Looks like you must have an outlook account to get in, but luckily gifadog already does his email there.

I would use again if I had a written story and just wanted to create a quick transmedia artefact. The no music thing is not great, the number of ways in which you can group things is. It is designed as ‘cards’ that you put in a storyline, easy to learn.

Here is my collage for calm after an hour of using only their content.Scroll down in the embed to view, but looks better on their site.

Door doors doors…

August 3, 2015 / DS106 on the couch / 0 Comments

[View the story “Just another Daily Create for #DS106 ” on Storify]

August 2, 2015 / DS106 on the couch / 0 Comments

I am really taken by bot wisdom of late. We did one daily create with @everyadage and I have been following it ever since. I love the nonsensical prompts that almost make sense. A couple of DS106 participants have been playing along with me @JanWeb3 and ds106ronald and we have been taking a few of the adages and making creative edits with the prompts.

So here is: Is it not unimportant to have trumpets coming from a bitter tulip?

I tried so many possibilities for showing this visually! How do you show a bitter tulip? In the end I settled for shrivelled equals bitter. What background is appropriate? In the end I settled for showing wonderful music coming out of the trumpet being played by the bitter tulip.

The idea here was: Is it not unimportant to have trumpets coming from a bitter tulip when they make such wonderful music?

As it is a saying (we have many sayings in the village) and I used village plain font, I am having it count for a few credits in #prisoner106.

How? All images CC0. I used Photoshop and mainly played with embossing and skew tools. Got texture somehow in the background and made a nice frame for it through render > picture frame.

This was challenging in design and made me play with new tools in Photoshop – had never used skew before. Hard fun! Thank you Ron and Janet for playing!

July 24, 2015 / DS106 on the couch / 0 Comments

“A reasonable alternative is to complete a piece that incorporates two different assignments for a sum total of 4 or more Credit Units.”

So I did the ‘I can read movies assignment’ and ‘the one story 4 icons’ assignment in one cover. The electricity in my tree house is on for another week as I am clocking 6 Credit units and another 2 for the extra hard work to combine two assignments into one. Although to be fair, I took this on thinking it would be easier than doing two. The new number two is clever with words. A reasonable alternative, indeed. I think I should get an extra 2 Credit Units for doing the whole thing rather than just one episode, but that might be pushing it a bit.

Behind the scenes

I wish I had used my notebook as I intended to keep up with all that I tried. A little like our resident artist futzing was a key ingredient.

I started with the idea that I wanted the cover to embody the sense of ambiguity that is the hallmark of the series. I read an amazing blog post today that spoke about the series as it “constantly offering us a seeming chance for escape, then pulling the rug out from under us.” Nothing is as it appears.

The post explores a Prisoner computer game that never tells you that you can escape the game by pressing the ESC key! The tag line of my cover comes from the end of this game. You win and it tells you: To win is to lose. Sheer genius.

The 4 icons are from our friends at the Noun Project. How awesome are they? I bought them all ‘cause I love supporting their artists.

I have been using their icons in my Prisoner posters series as comas and full stops since this run of DS106 started. It occurred to me that may be the ones I had chosen over time would embody key themes. I was right.

Birds singing seem happy and free, and yet the noise may attract attention when it is not wanted.

A prisoner in jail might seem a negative icon, yet prison is not always a bad thing. (I will not explain the photo below to avoid spoiler for participants still watching episodes).

The fish escapes the fish bowl and is free then it dies as it lands.

The sad ghost represents death and suffering and yet, if ‘to win is to lose’ may be to lose is to win?

The cover is for book 1 and it contains the story of 6. Hence 6 is 1.

I used Photoshop as usual. Started with one of the covers from the I can read movies series that was cleanest to get a clean black background with the clone tool. I started with a lot more text which disappeared as the 6/1 tension shaped my thinking. I discovered you can search google by ‘type’ of image as well as usage rights and this can find you components to use in a creative edit. The lapels from the jacket came to me that way. I pulled them out of original image roughly with quick selection tool and then added it in with screen blending option to blend in with the grainy black background. My little friend the colour dropper did its job to blend all the colours well. A little blur tool helped me along.

For the first time ever I grouped some layers so that I could line them up properly. The little icons and its background were a group. I used the Emboss Texture blending option to create a rough look to the background.

I feel I have got as close as I can to the essence of what makes this my favourite series of all time. It is to do with the ‘nothing is at it seems nature’ of it. The kind of story that destroys mechanisation by remembering that what makes us human are non-googlable questions such as why. Awesome.

This constant tension is even shown in the way the prisoner dresses. The lapels of the blazer showing that we have a prisoner dressed in a suit, highlighting perhaps that we cannot tell from external cues who is the prisoner and who is the guardian.

Total time spent: several days to get the bits and this afternoon pulling it together. I wanted to challenge myself so I did my best to attend to small details I might ignore in the usual run of things. Cool challenge, Number 2.

Be seeing you.

More experimentation with signs

July 9, 2015 / DS106 on the couch / 0 Comments

Another hard day at the hospital experimenting with signs for conformity.

And I even did an announcement so that residents are aware of the new sign as they walk around the village tomorrow. Let’s see if it helps everyone keep a still tongue

Dear Committee,

Urgent! You need to take action immediately. It seems that my video notes about the research have been stolen. I managed to take down the video in You Tube and for now our other location is safe. Somebody infiltrated the hospital secure ward and stole my materials.

I hope you will find it in your heart to forgive my mistake and not choose to terminate me.

Behind the scenes

It all started with me setting out to do the daily create. We were meant to explore boundaries in a video. I thought about it all day and decided I wanted to focus on social boundaries. What happens when these collapse and we end up airing our dirty linen in public without intending to? I remembered about the idea of context collapse as described by Michael Wesch amongst others.

Re-read the paper and it also explored what happens one step beyond contexts collapsing for us in our virtual lives. We imagine and prototype of ‘the public’ but this overwhelms us. So we hide in an ‘ideal private’ that is context free as we broadcast ourselves to the world (potentially). All that is left is the echo of ego in the mind.

Context collapse takes on a new dimension in which the
collapse of infinite possible contexts, what we might call a virtual “ideal type”
of “the public,” itself collapses with the individual’s construction of an ideal
private outside of all contexts. The scene exemplifies what Anthony Elliot and
Charles Lemert (2005) describe in The New Individualism as the “disappearance
of context” in which “we have replaced the old contexts of tradition and custom
with a focus on our individual selves” (p. 13).

Mike’s paper is about You Tube Vlogging and how it can be used to develop self awareness. I figured I could turn this inside out by using to tell the story of Dr M who is looking to find ways to ‘get residents to give information’ in the fictional village of The Prisoner.

It was of interest to me that in the prisoner the psychological torture is always about deleting contexts. A sense of claustrophobia develops as you watch as the psyche turns inwards. In that case physical and mental. In the case our online lives, contexts collapse via social media. Is there a way that context collapse may affect our mental health? This led me to the idea of spiritual narcism.

Spiritual narcissism is the feeling or thought that 1) I´m a spiritually advanced being, enlightened, third tier etc. and 2) because of that I deserve love and respect.

In the series, N6 has only himself. Can he trust himself? Does this drive him mad? I am reminded of the idea of being an ‘un-mutual’ in one of the episodes. Compliance in that case is forced by the threat of complete isolation. As N6 walks around the village, everyone turns away. It made me wonder if this ‘idealised private context’ we create when we engage in open online activity is to some extent driven by our fear of becoming ‘un-mutual’. Feeling suitably dystopian after #prisoner106 work today.

The daily create turned into a whole day’s exploration. Boundaries and what they mean have always interested me. Perhaps I should have kept to physical spaces….my front porch?

I cannot even start to offer information about the making of the video. Nothing worked as planned. I was going to be a ‘quick’ iMovie pull together a few fun things to take the story forward and explore boundaries. Let me just say it was not that. I ended up having to find and relearn the old iMovie. There was ScreenFlow, there was Audacity, there was Quicktime, there was Freesound.org and a stiff neck from sitting here all day making this ‘quick’ daily create. In the end, I was reminded of the simplicity and ease of the old iMovie as well as had much fun thinking about human boundaries collapsing, us becoming overwhelmed by the whole of life being accessible online and that driving us mad. <insert suitably scary loud laughter sound here>

(Source: https://player.vimeo.com/)

Village here we come!

June 28, 2015 / DS106 on the couch / 0 Comments

Over the next few weeks I will be on a special mission at Prisoner 106 Village. I have been hired as the Village Shrink to work at the hospital there. In order for you to follow some of the wild posts that may be coming you will need to be familiar with The Prisoner TV series. If this is not your thing, then I suggest you ignore all the posts coming up when you see the #prisoner106 tag. If this is your thing, my employers have provided a some handy information that has enabled me to create a page that will have all my work for the Village Committee.

I also have an assignment at the Bovine Village Fairy Tale Festival where I have been asked to support the Burgeron Family as they create tales of wonder from all over the world for the festival. I will be helping the matriarch of the family NanaLou to tidy up the family home to get ready for the festival – she is also concerned about the mental health of some in the family and so my shrink talents will be needed as well as my WordPress coding non-talents. I will be posting about this assignment under the tag #burgeron106.

Well, my new avatar is a requirement from the Prisoner 106 Village. Have you got your Jim Groom’s yet? This is a challenging assignment requiring me to ‘ease’ village visitors into the ways of our village. I will be using the Blue Dispenser technique to ensure everyone is fully cooperative in the Village. You can see one of the residents drinking from the Blue Dispenser in the photo of me at work. Nothing to be afraid of.

I just popped into the office to get my registration card. I think the Jim Groom’s make the photo. Don’t you?

We are on a mission from Open

May 3, 2014 / DS106 on the couch / 0 Comments

It’s 106 miles to Newscastle, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark… and we’re wearing sunglasses.

Remixed from Alphacoders wallpaper http://wall.alphacoders.com/big.php?i=204775 with OER 14 photo by Simon Thomson (@digisim)

As we sat down to plan, my most important concern was prepositions. I did not have the cinematic background to the Blues Brothers, so I did not know all the appropriate quotes! Was it ‘of’ or ‘to’ or ‘from’ open? Alan looked at me as if I were from outer space. The quote is ‘We are on a mission from God’ – he said. Well, the poster said ‘of’ and I thought it should be ‘to’. We agreed to go with the poster as we did not want to edit it yet again.

A big thank you to @digisim for a great photo.

There were other photos and we had a lovely time role playing a traditional business meeting with me as the mean boss. You had to be there. But here is the presentation we did not use. It was designed to be as boring as we could muster to contrast with our actual talk.

Oer14 presentation deck: We are on a mission of open from Mariana Funes

If you want to read the paper you can download it from my Mendeley account. There is much I learnt and much I could say (as ever) but I want to focus the rest of this post on how DS106 can go to work and make it better.

First the presentation. I have done many presentations for my corporate consulting work and for other academic conferences. Mostly using snazzier, perhaps more creative, presentations like the one above. This experience was different. DS106 gave us (me?) permission to be silly and tell a story. Yet the story we told was deadly serious.

We included the audience in our ‘meeting’ and it was a conversation rather than a presentation. The content was about how one person in one small area of a large organisation is bringing DS106 behind the corporate firewall.

As a organisational and people development specialist, I cannot stress enough the potential I see in this small ‘experiment’. We have evolved a model for developing people in organisations that uses internal employees rather than consultants and that has the potential to bring the whole of the open educational web into any organisation that sees the potential. I see that when Jim Groom and Martha Burtis talk about the 3 faces of open they have given us a distinction that could change organisational development for good. We can develop open pedagogy and open community behind the corporate firewall, yet it is entirely appropriate for us not to have open technology in corporations. This led us to speak of ‘the open organisational web’ and to the creation of an expert lynchpin to act as network connector between the corporation (3M) and the part of the open web that is DS106. Rochelle has excelled in this role she chose to call the Patroness of the Salon as a homage to early open education.

The experiment is being extended for another year at 3M and I am now interested in exploring how a model like this could be generalised to support learning and development in other organisations. I see myself as a coach to other internal employees who may want to take on Rochelle’s role but may not have the ability to live and learn in the open web. Looking to some of my corporate clients interested in experimenting as I write.

The presentation went really well, people had fun and we interacted around serious issues in a relaxed way. When I next coach one of my clients to give that all important presentation to their executive, I will introduce digital storytelling into the process as well as the psychology of communication. I cannot wait.

Next is what I personally learnt. I learnt how my own assumptions about what it means to be a serious academic can be successfully challenged. Hell, never again will I equate knowing my stuff with being boring as hell. Taking time to tell my audience stuff they can read in the paper to impress them is really not necessary. People prefer to be included in a conversation than deafened with me on permanent send.

DS106 #4life indeed. Both at home and at work. Thank you Alan and Rochelle – it has been a joy to learn about online collaboration with the both of you. You have given me a best case example of what is possible. The how of that, will be for another time.U

Update:

We did a show on DS106 Radio talking about the experience of DS106 goes to OER14. You can listen on Edu Talk.

Rochelle wrote about the desirable (?) difficulties of referencing for her first academic paper manually and the late discovery of technology to help this process.

Alan has written a balanced account of the presentation exploring the Blues Brothers theme and the more technical sides of the presentation.

DS106 on the couch