Monday, October 29, 2007

inter-avi communication in the virtual galaxy, smobs and dumbiuses, social networking pre-web, sleep walking art, and more...

Digital Storytelling in the Classroom now shipping! To find out more, go to the Corwin Press site. The book begins with "Twenty Revelations about Digital Storytelling in Education." We are up to revelation 15. You are invited to visit previous journal entries to read the first fourteen.

Revelation #15: Digital stories allow digital natives to pursue academic content in their own language.

Book excerpt: "Students inhabit a largely oral and digital world, then sit in classrooms where the printed word is the primary medium in play. Digital storytelling allows students to express content-area understanding in ways that are familiar. I have seen digital stories that do everything from explain math, science, and literature concepts to illuminate the interior landscapes of cultural, artistic, and personal perspective."

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A real road sign

A picture take
n by photographer Clay Good somewhere in the Catskills. It should appear at every on-ramp to the information highway.



Click on the photo to enlarge.

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The social networks in 1990 – forward to the past

The online environment has always been a social network to me, even before the Internet became a household word. I was emailing, maintaining BITNET listservs and using USENET in the early 80s. (Those of you under 40 will need to ask an AARP member about this).

In 1990, I began a multi-year virtual community study of an in-house computer conferencing system called PortaCom. The study turned out to be my dissertation.

1990 was pre-web:
  • nothing to click on
  • everything in text
  • mainframe dial-in access only
  • terse error messages
Sapes will be sapes. Yet, what I found then is still true now. People joined online communities to do primarily the following things:
  • expand social networks… meet new people, make new friends, connect with others they could not otherwise

  • engage in behaviors that they could not in RL… including the good (talking to people more honestly more often), the bad (cussing people out in virtual public), and the ugly (being rude just because and otherwise getting in touch with the adolescent within)

  • build mutually beneficial communities… to do things like teach classes, buy and sell things, plan events, work on joint projects, help find and exchange resources, achieve critical mass surrounding issues by forming e-coalitions
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social networking neologism

interlational
- a neologism (a new word) that emerged from my online community study, meaning "across social boundaries."

Usage: "This act of interlational communication was facilitated by a lack of social cues within the computer conference."

Back story: One day I was observing a group of high school students and their teacher who were sitting in the same room while communicating within a computer conference. Face-to-face, I heard a student address his teacher as "Mr. Smith," while within the computer conference he called his teacher by his first name. The lack of social cues encouraged the student to cross "social lata" and address his teacher more familiarly.

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New literacy: media collage. The shift from text centrism to media collage captured in a slide.

View entire "Beyond Words" presentation, from which this slide was taken.


Click on slide to enlarge.


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TECHST MESSAGES... news bits from the tEcosystem...

Quotables

"I link therefore I am."

Discover more quotables.

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More neologisms

Besides interlational (see above):
  • smob: smart + mob = smob. Isn't "smart mob" an oxymoron?

  • dumbius: see below.
Origin of dumbius. If there is such a thing as a smart mob, can there also be a dumb genius? Universities are full of them. They are called "dumbiuses." Singular is dumbius (DUM-ee-uhs). Say it aloud fast to clarify its true meaning.

Usage: "Bobbi's sure a genius when it comes to understanding the theory of relativity, but what a dumbius when it comes to making rude noises at a social gathering."

What's a smart mob?
According to Howard Rheingold (one of my favorite chroniclers of things digital), smart mob refers to a group demonstration or collective action fueled by information and communication technologies. As it is often used, it implies a spontaneous gathering facilitated by hand-held technology, though this is probably more accurately referred to as a "flash mob." Given that mobs are rarely planned, either can do. Purists may want to combine them to create another neologism, "flart mob," given that "smash mob" has so many unpleasant implications.

smob in wide use. Smob is the name of a band, a programming term, even an acronym for such worldly things as "student member of the board," and "
Swiss Study Group for Morbid Obesity." And dumbius appears to be someone's screen name. So, use both with care.

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Free Tutorial: ISTE Teacher Standard VI, via SlideShare.net.

ISTE
= International Society for Technology in Education.

ISTE Teacher Standard VI addresses the legal, ethical and human issues surrounding the uses of technology in education.

ISTE is the flagship organization for developing technology standards for K-12 education. Within its standards for teachers, students and administrators are standards that address the social impacts of technology. This tutorial addresses standards in this area for all three groups, while focusing on the standards for teachers.


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Inter-avi communication
Imagine not being able to exchange email with someone because you use Thunderbird and she uses Outlook. Or not being able to see a web page because it was only written for Firefox.

That is where the virtual galaxy is now. Currently there is no straightforward way for avi's from, e.g., Second Life and World of War Craft, to talk to each other or exchange information.

But that could change. Read all about it.

Think of it as cross-cultural communication in the virtual domain. Or as a serious step toward The Matrix. Techies call it "interoperability."

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Report I am reading: Online Nation by the Sloan Consortium.

Sloan has done it again. This is a great report that provides a 2006 snapshot of the state of online learning in higher education in the U.S.

Interesting findings:
  • During the last 5 years, online learning has grown 9.7%, compared with just 1.8% growth in overall student population.
  • Nearly 20% of all higher ed students in 2006 were taking an online course.
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Sleep walking art?
You mean, art that someone creates while sleeping?

Yes. Read all about it.






Saturday, September 15, 2007

Story thinking, truck art, how ads effect, robots understand jokes, the world beyond essays...and more

Digital Storytelling in the Classroom now shipping! To find out more, go to the Corwin Press site. The book begins with "Twenty Revelations about Digital Storytelling in Education." We are up to revelation 14. You are invited to visit previous journal entries to read the first thirteen.

Revelation #14: Combining storytelling and critical thinking defines an important pedagogical frontier

Book excerpt: "Story’s structure and rhythm, as well as the emotional involvement it encourages, can help us remember important information that might be forgotten if it is delivered to us in the form of reports, lectures, or isolated bits of information… But stories can be dangerous. Because engaging with stories demands that we ‘willingly suspend our disbelief’ (Coleridge, 1817), we let our guard down and tend to consume the story experience with little critical assessment...Clearly we need to blend the power and engagement of storytelling with the skills and perspective that insight and critical assessment offer.

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How Ads Effect

Pierce and feed the neocortex simultaneously. The power of so many advertisements is their ability to pierce the neocortex, while feeding it at the same time. In other words, ads need to get past your critical mind to make an emotional connection with you subconscious, while at the same time giving you good reasons to buy something, should you need to justify your purchase to yourself or others. The following diagrams depicts this:


-> Click on the image to enlarge it.

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New resources via jasonohler.com
  • Beyond Essays: How we show what we know in the digital age. Being literate means being able to consume and produce the media forms of the day, whatever they might be. For centuries this has meant media consisting primarily of words. But today's media forms consist of a good deal more than words: images, sounds, music, video, and much more. Putting them together requires media literacy. Doing so with expertise requires media fluency. See the beyond essays website for more.
  • Beyond Words: the Multimedia Collage, a keynote presentation built upon the material from the Beyond Essays website… described on keynote site.

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TECHST MESSAGES... news bits from the tEcosystem...

New York Times’ Enters Distance Learning Market

What's an outdated media source to do? Repackage what it has into learning materials.

The New York Times on Thursday announced a major push into higher education — with new efforts to provide distance education, course content and social networking. A number of colleges are already either committed to using the new technologies or are in negotiations to start doing so, evidence of the strong power of the Times brand in academe.

read more...

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96 percent of teens use social-networking tools

No surprise there. But finally we have some statistics to back it up.

read more...


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Conference I wish I had attended: WIRED' NextFest 2007 Education Day

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This issue's neologism: mediast (MEE-DEE-ist). One who creates, produces or works with media for a living or on an on-going basis.

Usage: "Today's student is a mediast by default, using a number of media to create blogs, movies and other media forms." ... I forget who I said that to.

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New fear I have: Robots understanding my jokes. Well, at least someone…er, something…will. Check out the New Scientist article.

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Cool art website I'm checking out: Truck Art. Artists turn 2D into 3D, this time on trucks. Or at least it appears that way. Could well be an elaborate PhotoShop ruse. Either way, quite something to behold. Here's an example. To see a bunch more, look at the entire gallery.

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Stories Help Us Remember, Web 3.0

subTechst provides vitamins for the mind for those concerned about their information diet...

Digital Storytelling in the Classroom: New Media Pathways to Literacy, Learning and Creativity begins with the chapter entitled "Twenty Revelations about Digital Storytelling in Education." We are up to revelation 13 in this journal. You are invited to visit previous journal entries to read the first twelve.

Revelation #13: Stories help us remember.

Book excerpt: "It was the practical value of storytelling that ultimately led me to see its utility as a learning tool. Story's structure and rhythm, as well as the emotional involvement it encourages, can help us remember important information that might be forgotten if it is delivered to us in the form of reports, lectures, or as isolated bits of information. It is precisely this quality of story, covered in detail in Part II of the book, that makes it so useful as an information organizer. While this quality has always been a hallmark of stories, it is particularly poignant now because we desperately need tools to navigate and coordinate the information that constantly overwhelms us. In many ways, story is the antidote to information overload."

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TECHST MESSAGES... news bits from the tEcosystem...

A Primer for the Immediate 21st Century, in 3 Steps

Are you pressed for time but need a big picture overview of the world according to Gates, Google and the other digiGiants who seem to be running the world? Then I recommend taking the following three steps:

Step 1: Watch "Epic 2015," by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson. As far as new media goes, this is ancient (that is, already a few years old). But it's still an excellent, quick intro about how we are becoming embedded in the World Wide Web. I love showing it to audiences just to hear them gasp.

Step 2: Read "Scan This Book," by Kevin Kelly. It places the world of words, books and ideas on a continuum stretching from many centuries ago to at least a few decades from now.

Step 3: Read "Second Earth," by Wade Roush. Google Earth and Second Life merge, and through our direct disconnection from the world of limitations we reconnect with it through the world of imagination.

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What's Web 3.0? The WWW is supposedly in its secondary incarnation, Web 2.0, which compels us to ask: What was Web 1.0 and what is Web 3.0?

- Web 1.0: A library and store

- Web 2.0: A social network and participatory commons

- Web 3.0: An ecosystem

More specifically, a "tEcosystem" (TEE-ko-sis-tem), an ecosystem created by humans, consisting of digital technology, connectivity and the communication they facilitate. The semantic, contextual web that is just now forming the basis of Web 3.0 will provide connections beneath the surface of our experience without our conscious direction, forming the subsystems necessary for a true ecosystem to develop. Web 3.0 is a big step away from our just using the Web and toward our actually becoming the Web.

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A Web 3.0 Primer in 4 Steps. Want a quick overview of Web 3.0 that will bring you more or less up to speed, at least for this week? Follow these four steps:

Step 1: Read Wikipedia's Overview. This is a great starting point.

Step 2: Read W3C's technical description. It's a difficult read for non-technicians, but read as much as you can until your brain grinds to a halt. Reading even a little will help you appreciate what is going on "under the hood."

Step 3: Read Sramana Mitra's Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS). It's an interesting perspective of where Web 3.0 is taking us.

Step 4: Go back and read Wikipedia's Overview, because it's already changed.

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What I'm composing: Would you like to hear – or download - my cell phone ring tone? It is the first 20 seconds of the third movement of a string quartet I produced on my now ancient synthesizer. This is all pre-GarageBand. Feel free to download and use it.

More of my music, including waltzes, radio drama soundtracks, and swing jazz? Hear here.

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Conference I wish I had attended: Games For Change Conference

Check out Games for Change Ga-Cha awards. The 2007 Winner's Choice Award went to Darfur is Dying. It was developed by students at the University of Southern California for the purpose of raising awareness about and providing a call to action concerning the genocide in Darfur.

Why are games suddenly so important and so potentially useful in education? For many reasons. Here's one: they epitomize the successful blending of the two most important pedagogical tools in a teacher's toolkit: critical thinking and storytelling.

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Conference I wish I were attending: Robotics Educators Conference.

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This issue's neologism: digiBling (DIJ-ih-bling). The 4 Gig jump drive hanging from a lanyard slung around my neck is more than storage – it's jewelry.

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Cool art website I'm checking out: Artists turn 2D into 3D. Amazing.
> See for yourself.

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New fear I have: That new technology will make it impossible for us to lie. It sounds great, until you realize that this covers everything, including telling people what you really think of how they dress, vote and even smell.
> Commiserate with me.

Friday, May 25, 2007

Students as heroes of their own stories...

Excerpted from Jason's new book, Digital Storytelling in the Classroom: New Media Pathways to Literacy, Learning and Creativity...

Digital Storytelling in the Classroom
(Corwin Press, due out in August, 2007) begins with the chapter "Twenty Revelations about Digital Storytelling in Education." We are up to revelation 12 in this journal. The first eleven can be found in previous journal issues.

Revelation #12: Students need to become heroes of their own learning stories as well as of the stories they tell with their own lives.

Book excerpt: "Above all, stories become the cornerstone of constructivist learning, in which students become heroes of their own learning adventures. This happens academically, with students building stories around academic pursuits. But it also happens personally. As a teacher, one of the most powerful stories you can ask students to tell is the story of their future selves in which they become heroes of the lives they want to live. If they are not heroes of their lives, then they become victims of them."

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TECHST MESSAGES... news bits from the tEcosystem...

Reports I'm reading: Both are from the Pew Foundation, and both are excellent:

- "A Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users." 'Wondering who's using Web 2.0? This report will help answer your questions.
> Read.

- "Wikipedia: When in Doubt, Multitudes Seek It Out." 'Wondering just how widespread the use of Wikipedia is? This report should help answer your questions. Be prepared to be surprised about the fact that it is in very wide use by the well-educated.
> Read.

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New Media I'm watching: The Machine is Us/ing Us, a YouTube short media collage about who we were, are, and are becoming in the world of Web 2.0.
> Watch.

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What I'm composing: "Swing Thing." A simple, exploratory piece combining Logic, GarageBand and Garritan Native Instrument sounds. What's important here is that someone with average performance abilities like me can use digital tools to bring to life the music he hears with his mind's ear. A lack of motor skill needn't stop anyone from creating music.
> Play.

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What I'm writing about:

- Web 3.0. If Web 1.0 was a library and store, and Web 2.0 is a collaborative, participatory commons, then what is Web 3.0? More about this in a future subTechst issue.

- The value added human being. For decades we have tried to digitally deconstruct people in one place and reconstruct them elsewhere, using email, video conferencing, Second Life… you name it. Whenever we engage in de-reconstruct, we detract from the face-to-face experience while simultaneously adding to it. Slowly we are reaching a tipping point, upon which two competing forces will try to balance: the value of being there vs. the value of not being there. Increasingly the value of not being there is not so much the convenience of not having to travel, but rather the digital depth and breadth we can add to someone's presence when we hold them at electronic arm's length.

The value added human being…it seems like one inevitable path we will take as we merge local and distributed, carbon and silicon, synchronous and delayed.

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What I'm neologizing in this issue:

- tEcoystem: the ecosystem created by humans consisting of digital technology, connectivity and the communication they facilitate.

- de-reconstruct: the process of taking something apart and putting it back together. Feel free to drop the hyphen (dereconstruct) or combine the prefixes (dreconstruct). After all, it's just language.

Note about new neologisms. tEcosystem (TEE-ko-sis-tem) is a neologism (a new word) but it is also an example of a neoalaghism (itself a neologism), which is a new word that uses one or more capital letters within it. I can only hope that after reading this you don't accuse me of logodaedaly.

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Cool art website I'm checking out: A lesson on perspective in art. Is it 2D, 3D? Both? Above all, it is done in a subway.
> See for yourself.

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Digital storytelling conference I wish I were attending: DS2 in Aberystwyth, mid Wales, on 21 June.

Speakers include:
- Daniel Meadows
- Shawn Micallef
- John Freyer

BBC Wales is holding an innovative mobile phone storytelling project in the two days running up to the festival.

Read more details.

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Jerry Springer show concept I'm considering: Kids from cross-platform families.

Mom's married to a Mac, Dad does PC (or vice-versa), and kids are caught in the middle as the bickering goes ballistic. Are today's cross platform kids the hoodlums of tomorrow's tEcosytem?

For those of you who don't know about the Jerry Springer Show, think of it as emotional gladiatorial combat in which participants use the truth about their private lives to beat the daylights out of each other…a fairly even mix of soap opera and professional wrestling match. The Jerry Springer Show is often referred to as "the worst show on television," yet enjoys incredible ratings, a fact that should keep media pundits guessing for years.

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

PowerPoint: Digital storytelling overview...

Hello-

A number of you from the Teaching, Technology and Learning workshop last Saturday (4/21/07) have requested a copy of my PowerPoint presentation about new media narrative and digital storytelling in education. I'm happy to provide access to it here for you, as well as the others who subscribe to this web journal. Click here to download it.

Also, many of the resources I referenced during the workshop are available through www.jasonohler.com/storytelling. My new media narrative and digital storytelling resources are divided into three parts:

- Storytelling, literacy and learning
- The art of storytelling
- Techniques and technology of digital storytelling

If you can't find what you are looking for please let me know.

Questions or comments?

Kind regards.

- Jason

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Stories make sense out of the chaos of life...

Digital Storytelling in the Classroom: New Media Pathways to Literacy, Learning and Creativity (Corwin Press, due out in August, 2007) begins with the chapter "Twenty Revelations about Digital Storytelling in Education." We are up to revelation 11 in this journal. The first ten can be found in previous journal issues. [ Buy book | Read more about it ]

Revelation #11: Stories make sense out of what would otherwise be the on-going chaos of life.


Stories are more than just good for us - they are essential to survival. I have come to believe that on a very basic level that feels biological to me, we need stories. Without them, life is just too overwhelming to piece together from scratch each day. Stories allow us to take snippets of life and put them together in ways that make it possible for us to learn and remember new things. They give communities coherence and our lives meaning. They make order out of what would otherwise be the ongoing chaos of life and help each of us create a sense of personal identity in relation to our communities and the world in which we live.

In short, storytelling is far more than entertainment. It is a set of practical processes that can be adapted to a wide range of issues, both personal and professional.

Saturday, March 24, 2007

Stories are much more than entertainment...

Digital Storytelling in the Classroom: New Media Pathways to Literacy, Learning and Creativity (Corwin Press, due out in August, 2007) begins with the chapter "Twenty Revelations about Digital Storytelling in Education." We are up to revelation 10 in this journal. The first nine can be found in previous journal issues. [ Buy book | Read more about it ]

Revelation #10: Story provides so much more than entertainment. It provides a powerful metaphor, framework and set of practical processes for resolving issues, educating ourselves, and pursuing our dreams.

The same story structure that frames much of our popular media can be used to understand and resolve conflict, overcome obstacles and mine opportunities.

We have the potential to become heroes of our own life stories in which learning is our quest and ignorance and fear are the dragons that need to be slain as we seek to resolve the issues that face us.

Friday, March 9, 2007

The attitude is the aptitude...

Excerpted from Jason's new book, Digital Storytelling in the Classroom: New Media Pathways to Literacy, Learning and Creativity...

Revelation #9: The attitude is the aptitude.


Because billions of bits of data hit the Net each hour, and because radio, TV, newspaper, magazines and the rest of the media tecosystem contributors continue to crank like there's no tomorrow, life-long learning has become a pervasive, immediate and on-going lifestyle.

The result is that the attitude has become the aptitude.

That is, your attitude toward learning new things – as well as your willingness to let go of obsolete information – plays an important role in determining your aptitude and intelligence. Digital storytelling represents one of those areas that tests educators' attitudes about the evolution of learning, not only in terms of tools, but also in terms of the nature of literacy and the kinds of classroom communities they want to support.

Sunday, January 28, 2007

Learning communities are storytelling communities...

Excerpted from Jason's new book, Digital Storytelling in the Classroom: New Media Pathways to Literacy, Learning and Creativity...

Revelation #8: Learning communities are primarily storytelling communities.


That’s when another revelation hit me: learning communities are primarily storytelling communities. Stories permeate our social fabric and have the primary function of teaching others, whether formally or informally. When you get right down to it, much of the communication that transpires among people, whether in a classroom, an office, or a living room, consists of telling stories.

I began to see and hear stories all around me, like a kind of social, emotional and psychological air we all breathed to stay alive. It become clear to me that our dependence on stories was deep and pervasive.

Saturday, January 27, 2007

Don't enable the technophile at the expense of the storyteller...

Excerpted from Jason's new book, Digital Storytelling in the Classroom: New Media Pathways to Literacy, Learning and Creativity...

Revelation #7: Don't enable the technophile at the expense of the storyteller.


To make sure I didn't enable the technophile at the expense of the storyteller I began incorporating storytelling basics into every class in which telling a story was a focus. I even brought in an oral storyteller to help my students learn how to plan, write and tell stories in front of people in traditional fashion.

I then helped my students transition from oral to digital stories, applying the tools in service of the story rather than vice versa. And lo, the quality of my students' digital stories rose dramatically. A result of this discovery is that I have included oral storytelling in my digital storytelling workshops whenever possible ever since.

Thursday, January 25, 2007

What happens when you give a bad guitar player a bigger amplifier?

Excerpted from Jason's new book, Digital Storytelling in the Classroom: New Media Pathways to Literacy, Learning and Creativity...

Revelation #6: What happens when you give a bad guitar player a bigger amplifier? If you don't have a good story to tell, using technology to tell it will just make that more obvious.


While I have welcomed the increased expression that the evolution of graphic, audio-video and other tools have brought to digital storytelling students, many years ago I realized something very interesting: as the technology became stronger, some of my students' stories became weaker. Some students seemed to have an intuitive grasp of using new technology powerfully and artfully, while others didn't.

In fact, for them the "story" part of their digital stories were getting worse.

It became my goal many years ago as a digital storytelling teacher to make sure that I was not enabling the technophile at the expense of the storyteller in my students.

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Art is the 4th R...

Excerpted from Jason's new book, Digital Storytelling in the Classroom: New Media Pathways to Literacy, Learning and Creativity...

Revelation #5: Thanks to our struggle to use multimedia effectively, Art is becoming the next literacy, or the 4th R.


In fact, it is largely because of the Internet and the need for an international Esperanto for our global village that art is becoming the “4th R” and “story” is becoming a key format for global communication. Because we now expect students to produce multimedia homework assignments, including web pages, PowerPoint presentations, and digital stories, the language of art and design is taking center stage. Once a hard sell for a practical public, art is becoming as important for workplace success and personal fulfillment as the other 3 Rs.

For more about this, I invite you to go to the Art the 4th R web site (jasonohler.com/fourthr).

Monday, January 22, 2007

The digital revolution in a sentence: Finally everyone gets to tell their own story in their own way on the great stage of the Internet...

Excerpted from Jason's new book, Digital Storytelling in the Classroom: New Media Pathways to Literacy, Learning and Creativity...

Revelation #4: The digital revolution in a sentence: Finally everyone gets to tell their own story in their own way on the great stage of the Internet.


In fact, if I had to summarize the Digital Age in a sentence it would be this: finally everyone gets to tell their own story in their own way. Digital cameras, painting programs, music keyboards and word processors – as well as all those technologies just around the corner that we can’t even imagine right now – give us new ways to personalize the methods of self-expression. We get to explore new communication forms with relative impunity because we can try out an idea and then change our minds, something that’s hard to do using a typewriter or a paintbrush. And thanks to the Internet, we have an international stage for the stories we tell.

Digital technology is assistive technology for the aesthetically challenged...

Excerpted from Jason's new book, Digital Storytelling in the Classroom: New Media Pathways to Literacy, Learning and Creativity...

Revelation #3: Digital technology is assistive technology for the aesthetically challenged.


I think of the tools of the Digital Age as being “assistive technologies for the aesthetically challenged.” They give the rest of us who didn’t learn how to use a typewriter or play a piano or wield a paintbrush a chance to tell a story.

Saturday, January 20, 2007

The digital revolution would have begun very differently if early computers had booted up in a word processor...

Excerpted from Jason's new book, Digital Storytelling in the Classroom: New Media Pathways to Literacy, Learning and Creativity...

Revelation #2: The digital revolution would have begun very differently if early computers had booted up in a word processor rather than a programming language.


It is hard to imagine, but in the early 1980s there wasn’t really any software! Word processors, spreadsheets and image editing programs were still far into the future. Computers booted up in a programming language, which was fine for the engineers among us. The rest of us would dig deep to find the programmer within and succeed after a fashion, despite our liberal arts degrees.

Even though programming was a calling few of us had, that didn’t stop me from using computers as storytelling machines. One of the first computer assignments I gave my high school students was to write a computer program that told a story about the values and principles that guided their lives. Despite clunky keyboards, fuzzy screens and truly inelegant software, the light of their stories shone through.

I have been involved with digital storytelling since the earliest days of personal computing, and although the tools have changed dramatically over the years, the nature of a good story – as well as the need to tell a good story – has not.

Friday, January 19, 2007

I know only one thing about the technology that awaits us in the future: we will find ways to tell stories with it...

Excerpted from Jason's new book, Digital Storytelling in the Classroom: New Media Pathways to Literacy, Learning and Creativity...

Revelation #1: I know only one thing about the technology that awaits us in the future: we will find ways to tell stories with it.


Once upon a time… long ago, during the early, dark days of the Digital Age (circa 1980), when the Internet was a secret information club for government officials, icons were religious symbols and iPods were something peas came in, the early adopters of digital technology used the crude tools of their day to create what we now recognize as “digital stories.”

Digital stories are simply the latest manifestation of one of humankind’s oldest activities: storytelling. As we are continually swept away by the latest wave of leading edge innovation, it’s reassuring to know that some things don’t change. From the age of prehistoric cave dwellers to the age of post-modern computer digitalists, our need to tell stories is one of those things.