Adobe Creative Cloud suite - online introductory session

Participated in a presentation, on the Abode Creative Cloud - 'Low-lift, high impact - Adobe pedagogy-focussed workshop. Hosted by Peter Nock from Ara Institute of Canterbury and facilitated by Manuela Franceschini -Adobe pedagogical evangelist.

Mainly a demonstration of what Creative Cloud is with emphasis on digital story telling. 

Began with introducing the post-text future, with the screenage predominating the ways we connect and interact with each other. Story telling is now even more important. However, short form videos (i.e. TikTok), captured, shared and viewed on mobile phones is now predominant.

Being an author means being able to tell the story on many mediums. 

Creative skills are now in higher demand., along with analytical skills, ability to solve complex problems, build and maintain relationships etc. Robot-proof higher education in the age of AI 

Introduced the concept of 'humanics' where by being human is even more important. 

Digital story telling is the creative process of using digital technology as a medium of as a tool of expression. For teaching and learning, not the tools but the skills, not creating media but meaning, not just telling but also contributing a collaboration, not an isolated story but sharing and connecting, not a transfer of knowledge but about amplifying and not substituting analog sources but transforming stories.

Include collecting, connecting and communicating in creating a story. Creative Cloud can be envisaged as a virtual maker space to produce and circulate intellectual work, to critically and creatively create solutions within the context of the 4th industrial revolution. 

Shared examples of student work using various Adobe tools / platforms. 

Important to support learners to become critical digital creators - not just viewers or users but creators, using evaluative and critical thinking skills. 

Demonstrated several examples.- videos, infographics, webpages, etc.

Moved on to focus on Adobe Express - for image/photo editing and Adobe Rush - for video editing - with Jason Grant. Went through the various steps for pre-production, production and post-production to build a story.

Using Sway

Sway is microsoft's free, online, presentation and storytelling app. I have been dipping in and out of it and the concept holds promises for enabling our staff and students to put together short presentations.

Several examples are showcased on the sway site, including this one on the future of education, and this one with examples for teachers. So education is one of the areas, the developing team have targeted as users of sway. Microsoft blogs indicate the trend with this one on using sway as a case study in education and another on teaching math with sway.

Also examples from ethos3 as a comparison between other presentation apps and mieexpert archiving various sway features and resources.

A few critiques / reviews from teacher with this one from the Australian teachers' blog and another which includes a tutorial on using sway / office mix from jonathanwhylie.

Looks like sway will be here to stay. Overall, the app is quite user friendly but tends towards a linear structure. So, sway is structured for linear rather than ad hoc storytelling. Along with office mix, sway provides an alternative to powerpoint. Both useful expecially for tutors putting content together for distance students and students to showcase their learning. However, there is a need to ensure story boarding type planning precedes, otherwise, messy presentations lacking coherence are the result :(

Telling our stories

Today, it is a public holiday in Canterbury, to allow people to attend a memorial service for the people killed and Christchurch residents badly affected by the 22/2 earthquake. The service will be held in Hagley park but also televised live. For everyone in Christchurch and NZ, it will be a time to reflect on the events of the pass 3 weeks. How the forces of nature can change the way we live and approach our lives. In this, we share a recent experience with others around the world including the recent cyclone in Queensland, floods in Brisbane and the horrendous earthquake, tsunami and potential nuclear fallout in Japan.

Over the past few weeks, I have been humbled and fascinated by the diversity of stories emerging. The NZ Herald has a series of videos  recorded just a couple of days after the quake. Everyone has a story of where they were and what they were up to when the quake hit. Most people were going about their daily routines, travelling on the bus through Lytellton and witnessing the harbour site buildings collapse; driving through the centre of town and just missing being crushed by a falling building; having lunch in the Art's Centre and walking through the damaged city to get back to their cars; crossing the Heathcote river in their best shoes and up to their knees in mud to get home to Sumner with the Ferrymead bridge closed; trying to get home across the boulder strewn Summit Road while negotiating landslips.Through all, there are stories of people going out of their way to help each other, of a stranger going out of their way to provide a lift to an elderly friend through the flood and liquefaction; of young men piggybacking kids and women across the Heathcote; of students spending time not only to clear liquefaction silt but to listen to and provide comfort to elderly folk. All of these stories example the good that has come out of people through a time of uncertainty and adversity.

At CPIT, a series of stories of CPIT staff and students lending a hand is on the website. Telling stories is in many ways cathartic. In sharing our stories, we acknowledge we are more than individuals, but part of a community whereby common experiences bring us together. As classes start to re-convene, it is import for staff and students to have an opportunity to share their stories. It is a good way to build up class rapport, community and increase engagement. Darel Hall wrote about the students of 2011 being 'special' and in a way, everyone who has experienced something momentous in their lives, is changed. The experience, if supported and the good things that eventuate nurtured, leads us to become better people.
Long may the story telling continue.

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!

Follow up on vodcasts - using mobile phones to tell digital stories

A follow through from the previous blog on vodcasting, Derek Wenmouth provided a link to project view which utilises mobile phones to collect media for videos that help communities around the world learn more about each other.

A paper by John Kuner describes the overall concept and it’s underlying philosophy provides good background on narratives and the potential of digital story telling to allow networks of people in various countries to form.

digital storytelling: Will it catch on?

A wet weekend provided me with the time catch up on organising my photos from the tramps over the last couple of summers! Sorting through the photos got me reflecting on how technology is changing the way we do things in so many small but life changing ways. One of the quaint customs members of my tramping group indulge in, is to have a reunion a few weeks after we have completed a long tramp together. It’s a way to share, as a group, the good & bad times of our tramp.

The usual ritual is to have a shared tea (evening meal), chat about the highlights of the tramp & share photos that some of us have taken of the trip. In the past, we will have slides and hard copy to view. Orders would be taken of various photos, so that the owners would be able to reprint the chosen photos and post them to the people who have selected them. The most organised of us would arrive at the reunion with stamped / addressed envelopes and enough small change to pay the various photographers for a copy of the photos selected.

In the reunion for my January Stewart Island trip, all the photographers had used digital cameras. We were a group of tail-end baby boomers, with most of us working in non-techy jobs. However, when it came time to viewing the photos, out came a couple of laptops & the photos were viewed on laptop screens. Sharing of the photos involved transferring the photos on to CD or in my case, on to my memory stick. I could also have used my mp3 player for storage. So, the more organised of us now come with post-it notes with our email addresses on them, blank writable CDs or memory sticks.

One of our group archives all her photos on to scrap book based photo albums. She is working on album number 40 plus. She printed out digital photos that she thought worthy of inclusion & organised them as usual, into her photo album. As for the rest of us, most of us transferred the photos on to our computer’s hard disk where they formed the basis of our screen saver display.

Like it or not, we are witnessing the change over from hard copy into a digital environment. The above is but one example of many small but important changes in the way we do things that lead on to a ‘tipping point’.

The next stage is to move on to a digital story telling format. I am awaiting this development to see how long becomes this becomes mainstream within our tramping group. As such, no one in the group blogs on their myriad tramping trips. Time is usually the excuse. We all have busy lives revolving around work, studies and family. However, as more of our tramping memories are collected in digital form, then more of us will eventually be recording our trips for posterity in digital format.