The topic for this discussion is the use of transmedia storytelling techniques within education.  We would like to explore what transmedia is and is not, why it is relevant and important, and what ground has been broken in this space- particularly with Inanimate Alice. 

We would like to explore new media literacies and how they can be used as a tool to assist in the teaching of academic disciplines.  I am pleased to have participating in this roundtable discussion the core members of the Inanimate Alice team: Kate Pullinger, Ian Harper, and Bill Boyd.

We invite GETideas.org member to ask questions and share their thoughts about the topic.

Transmedia is a natural merging of storytelling and prevailing technology.

Transmedia is not a tech toy.

As I’ve posted elsewhere (facebook, I believe), the “argument” for this “style” of learning (e.g., transmedia) will truly evolve once we get past the who, what, where, and when of the discussions–concepts of digitization, media/social media/transmedia, PBL, etc.–and focus on the whys. This will help get “old school” traditional educators, and countless districts and their billions of budgeted dollars on board. So many are suffering the false dichotomy of this or *that,* raising test scores or authenticating learning, using a novel or using transmedia. This isn’t a matter of either/or, it’s a matter of reconsidering our approach to learning considering powerful, prevailing local context (e.g., dominant, constantly evolving technology). 

The struggle here isn’t technology or even students, but rather people–their biases, their own belief systems, and so on. It is people that create policy, elect officials, write curriculum, teach students, etc. When we focus as much on the WHY this “stuff” works as we do on the bells and whistles–which are especially distracting and even misleading to the layperson–we have an opportunity to get more people on board, more resources, more momentum.

I’m not an educator, so I can only speak from my experience as an author (and a fan of Inanimate Alice!).

When I go on classroom visits to talk to elementary and middle school students about writing, they immediately think “books”—and I show them a bunch of mine. But then, I ask them to name other kinds of writing and, it takes a moment, but they soon start thinking about movies, TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, websites, theater, comic books, video games, board games, etc. I have a few samples to pass around of games and scripts. Next, we talk about how you can even write with pictures, using few or even no words—by drawing a storyboard of the Boston Tea Party event, for example. A story can even be told in actions—-a silent, living tableau of that same event.

Transmedia is about choosing the best media (plural) to tell a story, and it opens the world of writing to a mashup  of artists, geeks, musicians, orators, social media mavens, actors, historians, etc. It’s a team sport that stretches both the technical skills and collaborative skills of all the players.

My world, the publishing world, is scrambling to adjust right now as content creators move into enhanced ebooks, digitally native stories (like Inanimate Alice), and other new media and new platforms to showcase that media. The next generation, lucky them, is growing up and into the concept of transmedia storytelling from the ground floor.

The single biggest predictor of career success is the capacity to be “passionately curious” – the propensity and ability to ask questions around an issue and, once one’s mind has been sparked, to pursue further perspectives and information. In short, it’s a love of the process of learning, and you won’t find many successful people who don’t possess it as a quality.

That’s part of the strength of these techniques. In a narrative setting, transmedia storytelling is partly predicated on the realization that – increasingly – audiences are going to pick up on hints dropped within a story (“distant mountains” and “flow tags,” in Gomez-speak) and pursue them across platforms in a way that both enriches the narrative and fosters discussion. It shouldn’t be hard to see the parallels with education. Transmedia in education is less about finding a more efficient way to funnel facts into kids’ heads that can later be regurgitated on a standardized test, and more about providing a safe, trustworthy environment that can encourage kids to test their curiosity and begin to make connections between pieces of media.

Which, I guess, brings me to the parts of the techniques of transmedia storytelling that are somewhat less overt and understood – the ability to form connections (and, in the case of narrative, canonical continuity) between pieces of media based not only on an obvious factual connection (that might be hyperlinked on the web), but upon deeper thematic similarities. In narrative, we’re always asking the question “what makes a [XX] story – even if the characters and settings are different?” To answer that question, you often have to look beyond the superficial qualities of an IP to its deepest values.

I’m no expert on how the American education system works but I suspect that there is significant benefit in teaching a new generation of kids to think of learning not merely as a group of siloed subjects (“math,” “science,” “English,” “history,” and never shalt they meet) but as a series of interconnected principles. If my kid came home and told me that she read a novel in literature class, recognized thematic similarities with facets of, say, the French revolution and then followed aspects of a history textbook over to learn a factoid in the sciences, nothing would make me happier – especially if she had been encouraged to do that unilaterally. Transmedia storytelling is not a magic bullet, but by making issues interconnected and fun to explore, it might encourage a kid or two to realize the power of learning for its own sake.

The key connector here for me between transmedia and education is ‘narrative’, not simply because storytelling plays a crucial role in education from the earliest stages of a young person’s formal schooling, but because learning, arguably, IS narrative ie constructing stories is the way in which we try to explain the world to ourselves and to others. As a former secondary English teacher, much of my teaching was assumed to be about explaining various types of narrative – novels, short stories, plays or poems – collectively regarded as literature, to an audience who would not have been able to understand it on their own. This transmission model of education was considered the norm, and anything other than printed texts was regarded as inferior or for purposes of entertainment only.

Belatedly, educators are coming to recognise that for most people, moving image texts play a far more significant role in their lives than print-only text, and some curricula are beginning to reflect that. The lines bewteen media become blurred, as a text like Inanimate Alice demonstrates, and as storytelling apparently becomes more complex, the tools with which to create narratives become more widely available. The net effect of this shift, in terms of education, should be a democratisation of learning, with teachers and students learning together in a collaborative process, a much healthier model than anything we have previously seen.

Hello All.  I come to this discussion as a writer.  For me part of the early stages of developing an idea for a new story revolve around figuring out which platform or genre the story will reside in/on.  So, for instance, an idea might be for a short story, or for a novel, or for a digital fiction project.  In my experience digital fiction projects work best when they are born-digital, conceived of as digital projects from day one. 

I agree with Bill that the primary mode of education is through story:  a classroom needs a teacher, and it needs stories that the teacher can use to engage students in learning.  The more interactive and democratic this process is, the better and more exciting for all involved.  For me as a writer it was a great moment when I came across the first ‘new’ episode of our digital fiction project, ‘Inanimate Alice’ – an episode created by a group of teenage schoolkids and published online by their teacher.  This kind of reader-writer/reader-text interactivity seems to me to have huge potential and there is a lot that we, as creators, can do to help facilitate this kind of interaction.

We live in a highly visually literate culture and I believe that those of us who value text – the word on the page and the screen – (‘literature’!) – need to look for hybrid forms of storytelling as a way of introducing young people to the wonders of language, crafted text, and, indeed, reading.

Since the launch of the Inanimate Alice series, a few years ago now, we
have seen a considerable shift in the way teachers have been using the
series. In the beginning, episodes were presented to classes from a
single screen with the teacher firmly at the controls. Later, we saw small
groups of students sharing computer time, maybe 3 or 4 students per
screen taking turns in using the mouse. Only in the last 12 months or so
have we detected substantial one-student-per-laptop interaction with
Alice. Although such an objective has long been the target of leading
educators embracing the digital education revolution only very recently
have we seen it working in practice.

While those educators holding the purse strings debate their next
hardware purchases – “should we buy the iPad or not?” – we are
developing strategies for teachers and students to be able to interact
with Alice no matter what technology is available to them. Simon posed
the benefits to be gained by breaking out of siloed education. We want
to take that a step further, providing opportunities for anywhere,
anytime education, where for example, elements of the story appear on
mobile devices in ways that appear more entertaining and engagingly
interactive than strictly educational. We are striving to host that
stimulation and user generated content on multiple platforms that will
reflect both the journey of Alice’s story and that of the student aiming
to follow a similar path.

I will be very interested to hear from teachers who have progressed
from one-to-many to one-to-one digital education on how that transition
has worked for them. Moreover, I’d like to hear views from the group on
the next steps which take us to a transmedia environment where resources
and interaction addressing a single topic are provided across multiple
platforms. 

Interesting perspective, Kate.   Your points make me think further about what this means for our future readers and writers as well.  I would like to hear from other educators about what can be done to better prepare our students for consuming content across multiple platforms.  We are seeing- particularly in the case of Inanimate Alice- students become multi-platform producers themselves by mashing up commercial content or by creating their own original content that help extend the overarching narrative.  What can educators do to better support students’ efforts in becoming producers of transmedia content themselves?  What should transmedia experience creators consider to allow opportunities for this powerful participation to happen in their narratives?

Great points, Ian.  I am one of those educators for sure who transitioned from the one-to-many to one-to-one digital education.  Particularly in the case of Inanimate Alice,  my reason was simply that my students gained more from the experience by reading the story themselves.  They were able to drive their own learning by reading at their own pace and were able to experience the story better by participating in the narrative first-hand.  Many of my students said that it was only then they were able to fully understand what it was like to walk in the shoes of a character. 

As far as the next steps in taking us to a transmedia environment in education, from an educator’s perspective, I think that IP’s need to be created that are educationally sound and if at all possible linked directly to increasing student achievement.  Ease of use and accessibility amongst the masses should be a consideration as well.  Clearly the students have already taken this next step by demonstrating time and time again that they consume content voraciously across platforms and can benefit significantly from doing so.  It is up to us as educators to teach them how to do so responsibly and it is up to the creators to construct authentic, immersive, quality transmedia experiences.

Storytelling is the oldest form of teaching and probably the best way to learn. Our brains are hard wired to remember information in storytelling format.

For today’s child digital storytelling is a most logical step, both for consumption and creation. When I began to think about using Inanimate Alice in my teaching I hoped that it would ‘captivate, engage and educate’ in ways that traditional books had not for groups of 11 year old learners with dyslexia. There continues to be a chasm between the digitally saturated lives of our children at home and the relatively digital-free life at school. To connect learning literacy, language and the ubiquitous technology that surrounds us, digital storytelling seems to me to be worth a closer look. This is despite my own negative reaction to the form and my natural trepidation at being found wanting when tackling yet more recalcitrant technology (love it when it works…). But truly I can say that conventional methods of encouraging children to write have not been astoundingly successful. The learners I teach have failed, often spectacularly, at traditional reading but flourish with the broader range of texts now available. So what’s not to like?

I owe it to my students to help them develop not simply an array of literacy skills, but a ‘spectrum of literacies’ that will enable them to participate in, enjoy and find meaning in the major forms through which meaning is constituted. It is incumbent upon all educators to learn to analyse critically the new media we all consume and to analyse the media we produce. The tools for creating our own stories are so omnipresent, so user-friendly (mostly) that technical skills or tool literacy is no longer the priority in developing learners for the future.

My job is to help the children focus on the critical thinking necessary in all learning.

All the children I work with struggle with the basics of decoding text, with equivalent reading ages at least 3 years below their chronological ages. On the whole their understanding and receptive vocabularies are on a par with others of their age when the barrier of print is removed. They are learners with dyslexia.

All believe that they ‘cannae read’ (and still less write and spell) although most valiantly make every effort to learn most of the time.

They are finding IA so engrossing that there is no need to provide any other incentive. The children are actively engaged in investigating the text and very keen to produce their own episodes. With Inanimate Alice it feels as if the kids are connecting learning with their own personal experiences more than they do when reading print. The overwhelming sense, unsurprisingly, is that ‘books are boring’ and that this form of accessing story is ‘cool’ and ‘magic’.

One of the reasons why I became excited – and am becoming increasingly so –about using transmedia storytelling with learners with dyslexia is partly the obvious thrill for us all of doing something different that doesn’t reinforce their reading difficulties. Avoiding too much of the stuff that they are not good at, while developing critical thinking skills leads to higher levels of engagement. Higher order reading skills can be developed even when you struggle with print. All can learn to Make Predictions, Ask Questions, Make Comparisons, Look for Patterns, Make Pictures/ Visualise, Summarise and Evaluate: these are not dependent upon fluent decoding skills.

These inexperienced writers require strong models and significant support. Scaffolding is important. This is why basing our story on Alice’s adventures is so useful for these children who have found writing so very challenging.

The children are bursting with ideas which, to my pleasure, centre firmly upon the story rather than the telling of it, although that’s fun too.

There can be no doubt that this is real literacy with which we are engaged.

But for me the most significant effect has been to alter the relationship betweeen myself and my students. We are all learning together: I have made no secret of my own inexperience; they delight in teaching me how to play the games; they are keen to develop their own reading and story telling skills. It’s collaborative learning in a very real sense.

I have a question for the group, based on Ian’s notion of “anytime education”:

It has been posited, although I am unfamiliar with the exact metrics at play, that one of the reasons for the widening education gap is that affluent parents can send their kids to a camp during the summer where they can learn and interact, while other childrens’ summer months are essentially an intellectual wasteland.

Do you perceive there to be opportunities within the transmedia sphere to mitigate this issue by creating a transmedia learning environment as an “alternative summer”? If so, what – aside from cheaper tablet devices – would need to happen to make it realistic, rather than mere flight of fancy?

To a large extent we have taken it as a given that students will “get it” and concentrated on the educator’s journey. I’m quoting here from the wonderfully documented exploration of the series by Kenny Pieper:

“The creativity of my students is coming to the fore and I will let
them amaze me – no matter how tempted I am to jump in and join in the
fun.”

http://anotherramblingteacher.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2011-02-09T12%3A58%3A00-08%3A00&max-results=7

In another blog entry Kenny writes about sitting on his hands and letting them get on with it.

I have the impression that we are facilitating a process that will develop organically. To some extent students will tell us what works and help shape the experience.

I have been using ‘Transmedia’ techniques in my classroom and was excited to stumble across ‘Alice’. When I first read the term, Transmedia, I went immediately to search for what the word could mean. I was thrilled to find that it was approaching a story from different perspectives and using different media. In my high school computer class, I have always incorporated ‘creativity’ projects. This gave me a perfect method to have students approach a topic from different perspectives. Allowing kids to tell stories using different media and perspectives gave me the perfect way to allow for individual differences.

I am presenting the concept of Transmedia in Education at the ISTE conference in Philadelphia this summer!

Simon- I think one of the amazing things about transmedia in education is the interconnectedness it has the power to provide.  Students can be connected with one another and participate in immersive learning experiences, no matter where they are.  Recently I was reading an article from The Washington Post titled An Unorthodox School Reform Blueprint.  In the piece, it was suggested that schools in high-poverty areas be converted to full-time community centers.  I think this could be a key factor in restructuring our students’ summer experiences and in creating that ‘alternative summer’ you suggested.  Public libraries could be used for a similar purpose- therefore increasing their traffic and just further emphasizing their importance to their communities.  Clearly, for proactive change to occur in education, then efforts to do
so have to go beyond the teachers and extend into the community.  Building transmedia learning environments to connect technologies, languages, cultures, generations, and curricula will allow our learners to thrive. In addition, the beauty of transmedia is that it extends across platforms and into more traditional materials and even real-life.  Having a community center in which this type of learning can take place throughout the summer will significantly benefit all learners.