Tricksters

From NZ MaritimeMuseum
http://blog.maritimemuseum.co.nz

http://blog.maritimemuseum.co.nz/2014/06/maui-tikitiki-taranga.html

Maui Tikitiki a Taranga (Maui of his mother’s top knot) is a well-known Maori trickster. He exists with slightly different names in the Pacific and has a similar role – a bit like that of crow in some indigenous North American stories. Or perhaps Anansi the spider, in Africa.

Tricksters bring fire, fish up islands, hold the stories, tangle with death or create the world. They interact between humans and the gods- and at times the elements. They are also a bit mischievous.

And so it is with some people.

We were recently visited by someone I’d describe as a trickster who brought us some ideas, threw the idea of a storybox at us, asked us about OER materials and shared his views. He also encouraged us to sign up to the MOOC ds106 (more about this in another post).

He has been to Aotearoa New Zealand one or two times and while I don’t wish to assert that he has mystical powers I do want to assert that his visits are memorable mostly because he throws ideas at us with some humour saying “O.K. I am not sure what to do with this. What do you think?”. And off we go, Alan Levine, trying out new ideas and seeing if the fire we got from our grandmother’s fingers will be useful, or if having a longer day because the sun has been reined in makes us more able to grow food and survive.

storytelling in tertiary ed

Yes, ok it’s one of my pet ideas……but read on.

There’s been a lot of information lately about digital storytelling in education, and this paper Enhancing Student Engagement with Their Studies: A Digital Storytelling Approach says (in the abstract) ‘Results showed that the production of digital stories enhanced student engagement with their studies which led to high levels of reflection on the subject matter, which as a result led to a deep understanding of the subject matter.’

At the University of Houston there is a big focus on digital storytelling, and the University of Valencia also promotes it through publications like Appraising Digital Storytelling across Educational Contexts edited by Gregori-Signes and Brigado_Corachan where ‘each article explores the key role played by digital storytelling in the development and strengthening of multimodal literacies….’

In New Zealand Alterio and Woodhouse’s latest research Creating digital stories to enhance vocational learning makes these recommendations:

• “Show learners examples of digital stories that use multimedia, including static and moving images, music and narrative.
• Orientate learners to a reflective way of thinking and working by facilitating discussions about story elements such as theme, purpose and craft.
• Consider whether to assess the reflective process or the digital story and justify your preference to colleagues and learners. (We favour assessing as learning. Therefore, we assess the reflective thinking process rather than assessing the highly individualised creative stories).
• Ascertain the digital skills of learners and value and utilise them.
• Explore a range of digital storytelling software options. (For instance, Moviemaker which is free and easy to use).
• Build learners’ vocational learning and literacy skills using reflective conversations and scriptwriting strategies that relate to course content and storyboard development.
• Allow plenty of time to move through each storytelling stage. Remember the learning is in the process. Have fun!”

Alterio and McDrury have long promoted the use of digital storytelling in education and you can find a chapter Collaborative learning using reflective storytelling in the excellent book Reflection to Transformation, edited by Zepke and Leach.
Search online for digital storytelling and you’ll find a wealth of information, for example the article How My Students and I Benefit from Digital Storytelling from which I re-used the image, after checking for copyright restrictions..

Interested? Ask us?

being authentic

The elearning nomad writes convincingly about learning design principals and the need to develop authentic activities.

In a post about increasing course participation rates she says “The key here is to get inspiration from real life. Don’t polish the problem. Make it complex, controversial and smart. Add inspiring characters to the story – your learners need to be able to identify with them”.

And so following on from our post about transmedia storytelling and alluding to the one about purposeful play, we wanted to share a couple of Moodle sites that we have worked on with tutors. Although team and collaborative tasks are only a small part of the courses, we are hoping to increase these facets as time goes on.

The first course is a hospitality course – the brain child of tutor Gavin Mackenzie. We have used an integrated story based around a hotel kitchen. The students have to write memos, explain to the new manager how to develop new menus and give realistic presentations to their colleagues. The course starts next week so we hope the students really get involved in this.

In another course – also within the School of Hospitality, tutor Rochelle Gilmoni used the story of a local hospitality business to introduce students to authentic activities and an ongoing story. She interviewed and filmed the manager/owner, asking pertinent questions about his business, then set related activities as assessments.

For all of us developing these courses it felt like purposeful play – and for the students the activities relate to real and authentic activities.

more thoughts about purposeful play

iStock_000035426290Large

The words “purposeful Play’ came to my mind – but clearly there is an old and forgotten reference. Purposeful Play, of course is something from the Playschool sector.

However I did find a reference to purposeful playing via a website called Reboot Stories. A post from 2012 on the site says
” ‘Researching Reboot Stories’ experiments with open design and story I came to think of it as Purposeful Storytelling. Stories have long been used for the purpose to inform, sell or persuade, but we’re onto something that involves story to ignite action and THEN do all of the above. I mean using storytelling to solve problems, […]”

This ideas links to something called transmedia stories – something I found on the Big Idea website where I found a report about a workshop run recently by Jeff Gomez. Essentially transmedia stories are ones that reach across time and platforms. As I understand, we start with a story in a book, for example, and it may get picked up online, followed via Twitter, developed on Facebook and, I guess, resolved face to face (perhaps in a theatre), or on screen.

These kinds of ideas, of course, apply to teaching and learning but I am also keen to see how such an ideas might apply to communities and their development and continued existence.