Web 2.0 storytelling - using narratives in research

Last week, I was working on the Ako Aoteoroa funded ‘teaching craftsmanship’ research project which involves the building of narratives based on information gleaned from questionnaires and interview content. Each narrative is constructed based on set criteria. This then allows a horizontal comparison to be made between each narrative. Commonalities and differences are then easier to distil out of the mass of data presented.

I could clinically construct the narratives as a large spreadsheet or table but building narratives is imminently more satisfying J Narratives are also much more pleasant to read and some of the characteristics that define each research participant come through, even in a rather objectively composed narrative. The narratives tell stories which are much richer and intense then a list of characteristics off a spreadsheet.

However the above is my interpretation, as a researcher of the participants’ original stories. I need to put some time into exploring how to provide opportunities in my future research projects to record participants’ own narratives.

Bryan Alexander & Alan Levine discuss in an educause review article the emergence of the genre of web 2.0 story telling. They propose they consolidation of a range of social networking tools as being methods by which people are able to ‘tell stories’ about their lives. Alan Levine aka Cogdogroo provides 50+ways to tell digital stories, so there are no shortage of ideas of how to people can garner their experiences, archive them on various sites and for others to follow the threads of their thoughts & learning as they navigate through the various hyperlinks presented. Liz Kolb provides a couple of examples of how to use the mobile phone to create digital storybooks using yodio. Chrissy Hellyer presents the use of voice thread as a digital portfolio & Photopeach as another option.

Lots of ideas, some of which I have explored in the mobile portfolios project. Bringing the opportunity of recording learning while it is taking place provides for many possibilities to extend on Graham Nuthall & others’ work on the hidden lives of learners. The emerging field of multimodal discourse analysis is something I will need to explore as this provides for the rigorous data analysis of the plethora of data that will emerge from investigating participant generated artefacts!

Using presentations in education - moving beyond powerpoint

I have started planning towards a workshop on different ways to use powerpoint and other forms of ICT assisted presentation. The main objective is to showcase a few different ways to make ICT presentations more interesting and to provide alternatives to ‘death by bullet points’.

The other major objective is for tutors to realise that they do not need to do the work of preparing presentations but that the examples could be introduced to students. Students can then move ahead to conceptualise, prepare, construct & present the material. It makes use of the concept of the student being ‘the producer, not just a consumer’.

To start with, a couple of alternative ways to present using powerpoint can be discussed. These include using powerpoint for publishing, as a backdrop for drama productions, pecha kucha and other similar methods.

Then an introduction to Web 2.0 based presentation sites via exploration of webtools4u2use and examples in readand writeweb, cogdogroo, worsefor wear and boxoftricks. This is followed by a brief look at presentations on prezi and animoto.

In short, the workshop was to encourage tutors to be more aware of the tools, available via the web, to engage their students in using the vernacular they are familiar with to express themselves.

The dialogue which follows student presentations also provide important learning opportunities. I find that it is important to facilitate student reflection on each presentation and sometimes to summarise or make links/applications on the white board while students are debriefing. This not only provides notes for future discussion and work but also models the process of reflection.