Course Content

This the first in our series of lessons of influential people who have written about media and its effect on people. One of the things that sticks out when reviewing most all software design models is that you needs analyze your audience. In doing that, you must also pay attention to those things that affect how your audience thinks, learns, and communicates. One of the most influential thinkers on this subject was Marshall McLuhan. The interesting thing about his work is that, by reading his thoughts you would think he was living today. Actually he died much prior to the Internet , PC, and all the pervasive media around us today. Yet, he seemed to sense where we were going as a digital culture. The more you study him the more you should realize this.

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McLuhan was born on July 21, 1911 in Edmonton, Alberta. McLuhan professed not to be bothered, at least in retrospect, by his growing up in a backwater—his family moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba, a few years after his birth and McLuhan remained there until he attained an M.A. in English literature from the University of Manitoba in 1934.

After leaving Manitoba, he spent two years acquiring a B.A. from Cambridge University. There he studied under I. A. Richards, a psychologist turned literary critic who examined the process of reading. 
For Richards it was not the paraphrasable content of a poem that mattered but the way the poem communicated certain effects in the mind of a reader. In later years, McLuhan adapted this technique to the study of media, inspired as well by another Cambridge professor, F. R. Leavis, who urged his students to analyze their cultural environment— advertisements in particular—in the same way they analyzed literature. McLuhan’s first book, The Mechanical Bride, published in 1951, was very much an exercise in cultural criticism in the Leavis mode, a series of essays on advertisements, laying bare their cultural roots and assumptions.

After he left Cambridge in 1936, McLuhan taught for a year at the University of Wisconsin, and then, following his conversion to Catholicism, he joined the faculty of a Jesuit institution, the University of St. Louis. There he married a Texas drama student named Corinne Keller Lewis, with whom he had six children. In 1944 he returned to Canada where he taught for two years at what was then known as Assumption College in Windsor, Ontario, before finally settling at the University of Toronto, his home for the rest of his career. Here he met a political economist named Harold Innis who had discovered that certain media of communication are time based and certain media—more portable and ephemeral—are space based. Working with this hint, and discovering simultaneously in the works of James Joyce, notably Finnegans Wake, a critique of radio and television, McLuhan articulated his perceptions of media as extensions of the human body, and of electronic media, in particular, as extensions of the nervous system, imposing, like poetry, their own assumptions on the psyche of the user.

Some interesting quotes remain in the public domain and remain a part of our everyday thoughts abut the media, including:

With telephone and TV it is not so much the message as the sender that is “sent.” In short, the medium that communicates the message helps define both the message that is received and (which is my point here… ) the those who utilize that medium the most.

My point is, if we are indeed living in a digital world then there are things about these kids that we should be learning about in order to reach them, build media products for them, and so forth. The best place to start is to discover Marshall McLuhan, the father of these ideas.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Why is the title of the book “The medium is the massage” and not “The medium is the message”? (this is one of the books that McLuhan is most famous for)

Actually, the title was a mistake. When the book came back from the typesetter’s, it had on the cover “Massage” as it still does. The title was supposed to have read “The Medium is the Message” but the typesetter had made an error. When Marshall McLuhan saw the typo he exclaimed, “Leave it alone! It’s great, and right on target!” Now there are possible four readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate: “Message” and “Mess Age,” “Massage” and “Mass Age.”

On media and technologies as Extensions of Man (subtitle of Understanding Media)

It was R. W. Emerson who wrote that “The human body is the magazine of inventions, the patent-office, where are the models from which every hint was taken. All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and senses” (1870). This is where McLuhan borrowed the idea that media, as an invention of man, is actually an extension of man.. just like one of his limbs.. etc…. etc>)

On the source of the phrase, Global Village

As to the origin of the term “global village” in McLuhan’s work. it has been variously attributed, to Teilhard de Chardin, for example. He did not get it from Teilhard, however. As far as I have been able to ascertain, it comes from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake or else from P. Wyndham Lewis’s America and Cosmic Man—if it comes from anywhere.

Joyce published Finnegans Wake in 1939. In it he uses two phrases, both allude to the Pope’s annual Easter message to the City (of Rome) and the World: Urbi et Orbi. Joyce turned this into “urban and orbal” in one place in the Wake, and into “the urb, it orbs” in another.

The painter and writer, Wyndham Lewis and McLuhan were close friends in the 40s and 50s. Lewis published America and Cosmic Man in 1948 (Britain) and 1949 (US). Here is the eleventh paragraph of Chapter Two of that book:
If you look at North America on the map of the world, you see a very uniform mass. It is more concentrated and uniform than any other land mass. You see an immense area full of people speaking one tongue: not a checkerboard of “united states” at all but one huge State. “United States” is today a misnomer. And since plural sovereignty anyway–now that the earth has become one big village, with telephones laid on from one end to the other, and air transport, both speedy and safe must be a little farcical, the plurality implied in that title could be removed as a good example to the rest of the world, and the U. S. A. become the American Union.

Now, McLuhan was a great fan of Joyce’s and had read the Wake closely for years. Also he and Lewis discussed these and related matters frequently during the years of their association. And he had marked the phrases in Joyce and the paragraph in Lewis’s book, and pointed them both out at one time or another. But I think the truth of the matter simply that he was thinking along those lines and came up with the phrase and after the fact found it echoed in both writers.
In Understanding Media he put the matter this way: “…since the inception of the telegraph and radio, the globe has contracted, spatially, into a single large village. Tribalism is our only resource since the electro-magnetic discovery. Moving from print to electronic media we have given up an eye for an ear.” (xii-xiii)

On “The Medium is the Message”

Each medium, independent of the content it mediates, has its own intrinsic effects which are its unique message. The message of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. The railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure. This happened whether the railway functioned in a tropical or northern environment, and is quite independent of the freight or content of the railway medium. (Understanding Media, N. Y., 1964, p. 8)
What McLuhan writes about the railroad applies with equal validity to the media of print, television, computers and now the Internet. “The medium is the message” because it is the “medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.” (p. 9)

So where do we go from here?

Let’s take a look at some of his more important works:

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man is a pioneering study in the fields of oral culture, print culture, cultural studies, and media ecology.
Throughout the book, McLuhan takes pains to reveal how communication technology (alphabetic writing, the printing press, and the electronic media) affects cognitive organization, which in turn has profound ramifications for social organization:

The global village (a term he invented in the 1960s)

In the early 1960s, McLuhan wrote that the visual, individualistic print culture would soon be brought to an end by what he called “electronic interdependence”: when electronic media replace visual culture with aural/oral culture. In this new age, humankind will move from individualism and fragmentation to a collective identity, with a “tribal base.” McLuhan’s coinage for this new social organization is the global village. The term is sometimes described as having negative connotations in The Gutenberg Galaxy, but McLuhan himself was interested in exploring effects, not making value judgments: Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. […] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. […] In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.

Key to McLuhan’s argument is the idea that technology has no per se moral bent—it is a tool that profoundly shapes an individual’s and, by extension, a society’s self-conception and realization:

Is it not obvious that there are always enough moral problems without also taking a moral stand on technological grounds? […] Print is the extreme phase of alphabet culture that detribalizes or decollectivizes man in the first instance. Print raises the visual features of alphabet to highest intensity of definition. Thus print carries the individuating power of the phonetic alphabet much further than manuscript culture could ever do. Print is the technology of individualism. If men decided to modify this visual technology by an electric technology, individualism would also be modified. To raise a moral complaint about this is like cussing a buzz-saw for lopping off fingers. “But”, someone says, “we didn’t know it would happen.” Yet even witlessness is not a moral issue. It is a problem, but not a moral problem; and it would be nice to clear away some of the moral fogs that surround our technologies. It would be good for morality.

The moral valence of technology’s effects on cognition is, for McLuhan, a matter of perspective. For instance, McLuhan contrasts the considerable alarm and revulsion that the growing quantity of books aroused in the latter seventeenth century with the modern concern for the “end of the book.” If there can be no universal moral sentence passed on technology, McLuhan believes that “there can only be disaster arising from unawareness of the causalities and effects inherent in our technologies.”

Though the World Wide Web was invented thirty years after The Gutenberg Galaxy was published, McLuhan may have coined and certainly popularized the usage of the term “surfing” to refer to rapid, irregular and multi-directional movement through a heterogeneous body of documents or knowledge, e.g., statements like “Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave.” Paul Levinson’s 1999 book Digital McLuhan explores the ways that McLuhan’s work can be better understood through the lens of the digital revolution. Later, Bill Stewart’s 2007 “Living Internet” website describes how McLuhan’s “insights made the concept of a global village, interconnected by an electronic nervous system, part of our popular culture well before it actually happened.”

Understanding Media (1964)

McLuhan’s most widely known work, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), is a pioneering study in media theory. In it McLuhan proposed that media themselves, not the content they carry, should be the focus of study—popularly quoted as “the medium is the message”. McLuhan’s insight was that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered over the medium, but by the characteristics of the medium itself. McLuhan pointed to the light bulb as a clear demonstration of this concept. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that “a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence.” More controversially, he postulated that content had little effect on society—in other words, it did not matter if television broadcasts children’s shows or violent programming, to illustrate one example—the effect of television on society would be identical. He noted that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book could be reread at will, but a movie had to be screened again in its entirety to study any individual part of it.

Tetrad

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In Laws of Media (1988), published posthumously by his son Eric, McLuhan summarized his ideas about media in a concise tetrad of media effects. The tetrad is a means of examining the effects on society of any technology (i.e., any medium) by dividing its effects into four categories and displaying them simultaneously. McLuhan designed the tetrad as a pedagogical tool, phrasing his laws as questions with which to consider any medium:

1. What does the medium enhance?
2. What does the medium make obsolete?
3. What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?
4. What does the medium flip into when pushed to extremes?

The laws of the tetrad exist simultaneously, not successively or chronologically, and allow the questioner to explore the “grammar and syntax” of the “language” of media. McLuhan departs from his mentor Harold Innis in suggesting that a medium “overheats”, or reverses into an opposing form, when taken to its extreme. Visually, a tetrad can be depicted as four diamonds forming an X, with the name of a medium in the center. The two diamonds on the left of a tetrad are the Enhancement and Retrieval qualities of the medium, both Figure qualities. The two diamonds on the right of a tetrad are the Obsolescence and Reversal qualities, both Ground qualities.

Using the example of radio:

• Enhancement (figure): What the medium amplifies or intensifies. Radio amplifies news and music via sound.
• Obsolescence (ground): What the medium drives out of prominence. Radio reduces the importance of print and the visual.
• Retrieval (figure): What the medium recovers which was previously lost. Radio returns the spoken word to the forefront.
• Reversal (ground): What the medium does when pushed to its limits. Acoustic radio flips into audio-visual TV.

Take a look at the above four laws and apply them to ANYTHING you develop or try to sell after the product has been developed… What new does it bring to the table? What does the old knowledge flip into? In other words can the previous untruth mistaken answer become the catalyst for something else? Does that old knowledge misunderstanding ‘reinvent itself” so it too can become new? I have used this diagram to explain almost anything I am trying to introduce.. including story-telling, which I will explain in a later lesson.

Change is what we all do for a living. All educators are in the change business. In this case, we are changing preconceived ideas, and cognitive, affective and psych-motor behaviors. So, it makes sense to discuss change in the classroom and to do a project on change. We are also coupling this content with a discussion on Malcom Gladwell, the author of his recent book on change: The Tipping Point.

Introduction

So, let’s get started. The videos posted here are a series of segments from a larger presentation/workshop I conducted on change in the classroom. The following is an introduction of the various cultural periods we have gone through that serves as an introduction to the concept of change and how it was fostered through the ages:

Next, we discuss the current period, what I refer to as the Participatory Culture. I am not alone. In fact, I learned it from my friend and colleague, Dr. Henry Jenkins, who I refer to as the 'father of participatory culture':

To help you better understand what is being discussed here, I turn your attention to a white paper written and presented by Henry at a recent conference of Digital Media and Learning sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation. It is quite long, so don't be put off by it. You can browse through it to get some of the main points.

To help you understand things further, take a look at this link and a You Tube Video that are referred to in my slide show video:

• Digital Narratives

• Prometeus: The Future of Media

This next part of the lesson I discuss the concept of change theory and how it applies to the classroom:


This final section covers social epidemics. This section is directly related to the Tipping Point discussions and the lesson on Malcom Gladwell. Once we understand that, we review our concept of story and change (a contextualized representation/demonstration of cause and effect and consequences for one's actions).. completing the cycle....

The next question is.. where does story fit in? If you recall, story is based on change/transformation.. and those changes are a result of cause and effect... so to tie all together... an episode/story/narration demonstrates cause and effect and consequences... the story can be told using any one or more different media (text, orally, dance, art, pantomime... and even technology.. given that this course is about still and moving imagery.. we should utilize that mediation... couple this with your new-found knowledge of change theory and you have a very powerful method of instruction for the classroom!

But before we begin, perhaps you would like some examples of others' conceptualizations of change stories....Here are a couple links to Change Story Projects that might help give you a better understanding of what these are and why they are so integral to implementing change:

• The Members' Project (American Express)
• Stories For Change

We take this knowledge of HOW kids learn, apply CHANGE DIFFUSION THEORY to implement a motivating learning environment with media, mix in Gladwell's ideas on TIPPING POINT and SOCIAL EPIDEMICS.. and we end up with a new formula for mediated learning (where technology/media fits in)...

This video is a continuation of the Story and Learning Lesson. An author uses words to tell their story, a video person or movie maker uses a different medium (video) for that purpose. The needs are the same, but the tools are different.

For many of you this will be a new topic. Creating/inventing stories is not the same thing as learning about the elements of story. The former describes the list of the elements of a story. The story creation process is when you can actually create one that has all the elements in it.

This lesson introduces you to the elements of storytelling from a movie maker or videographer’s perspective.

Watch the video and then do the activity below.

Click on the video to play it. Notes are provided below for you to follow along:

Story structure and design described below is based on the works of  Joe Lambert  & Bruce Block

Story and Visual Structure

• Visual structure is controlled by the principle of Contrast and Affinity

Construct:

• Beginning -Exposition (EX)
• Middle – Conflict/climax/rising action (CO, CX)
• End – Resolution (RS)

Principle of Contrast and Affinity

• CONTRAST = GREATER VISUAL INTENSITY
• AFFINITY = LESS VISUAL INTENSITY

• Writers use words to create story intensity
• Musicians use notes
• Film producers, videographers use space, line, shape, tone, color, movement, and rhythm
• Once we understand the story’s intensities, we can arrange the basic visual intensity.

Visual structure has a resolution also..

Also varies by production type:

• Advertisement/commercial
• Documentary
• Found footage
• Video Game
• Internet
• Single vs Multiple cameras
• Animation

References:

 

• About Joe Lambert at the Center for Digital Storytelling
• How to Tell a Visual Story
• Bruce Block

 
Here is a short excerpt from Bruce Block’s book: The Visual Story:

We have now gone through the story invention process a couple of times. I am a believer that you sometimes have to touch a topic three times to make sure it sinks in. From a writer’s point of view, it is one thing to identify the fours aspects of a story when creating the storyboard (a la Branigan), it is quite another for a reader/viewer to recognize these in a story being presented to them.

The most common types of story is one which the man character(s) are struggling against the odds/conflict being imposed on them. So, how many plots are there? Some believe that the prototype is the Seven Russian Wonder Tales. Others suggest that there are 20 Master Plots. There is even one proposal that it all boils down to one: The Hero’s Journey.

Regardless of what you believe the gist of all of this is that there is a finite number. What makes for the perception of an innumerable set of plots is the setting, the use of different character types, and the genre. ‘Darth Vader’ in Star Wars is to sci-fi what ‘Black Bart’ was to the classic Western. ‘Mr. Spock’ to the ‘Joe Friday’ in Dragnet (just the facts, ma’am”)… Usually the plot centers around man’s (I use this term generically) against some outside or inner force or demon…
 

Here is a partial list:

• Man v Self (Revolver: internal struggle)
• Man v Man (Kill Bill: two people in direct struggle)
• Man v Society (1984: some sort of social issue)
• Man v Nature (Alive: Man surviving)
• Man v Supernatural (Insidious: outside of the natural realm)
• Man v Technology (The Ghost in the Shell (Japanese): everyday in the labs)
• Man v Destiny (Oepidus Rex: fate v free will)

To demonstrate the point let’s take apart a fairly average movie that is highly illustrative of this concept… in fact, the whole premise of the storyline is based on the foundations of our four part story creation… At first, I wasn’t sure if I was going to like this movie but as I watched it I began to realize what a fantastic exemplar it would be for my classes.

THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU

 

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This module is offered to bridge some of that content to the concepts of visual literacy, something that is quite relevant to this course. Our intent is to overlap but not duplicate the information. The intent of this lesson is not to lecture you about visual literacy or to provide you with all the answers about the subject. But to get full value out of this module it is expected that you will read what is printed here as well as click on the many links provided.

…and I do expect that this lesson will actually raise more questions… So:

Question #1:

Is that necessarily a bad idea?

Hopefully, not… The intent is to get you to begin thinking about instructional message design a bit differently and to understand how media affects communication and learning. A good place to start is with the term: symbolism.

To reiterate: WE ARE INTERESTED IN INTRODUCING THE CONCEPT OF VISUAL PERCEPTION and in particular VISUAL LITERACY

Below are a few concepts:

Stroop effect

The Stroop effect is a demonstration of perceptual interference in the reaction of a task. When the name of a color (e.g., “blue,” “green,” or “red”) is printed in a color but spells out a different name (e.g., the word “red” is printed in blue ink instead of red ink), it has been found that naming the color of the word takes longer and is more prone to errors than when the color of the ink matches the name of the color. The effect is named after John Ridley Stroop who first published the effect in English in 1935. The effect had previously been published in Germany in 1929. The original paper has been one of the most cited papers in the history of experimental psychology, leading to more than 701 replications.

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Here is a great site that explores this entire spectrum of visual perception.

Here are some of the major points to consider:

• Confronted by a visual image, humans generally separate out (extrapolate) a dominant shape (a ‘figure’ with a definite contour) from what is relegated to the ‘background’ (or ‘ground’).
• Gestalt psychologists outline what appears to be several fundamental and universal principles (sometimes even called ‘laws’) of perceptual organization. The main ones are (some of the terms vary among scholars): proximity, similarity, good continuation, closure, smallness, ‘surroundedness’, symmetry and ‘pragnanz’.
• Categorization is a key ‘top-down’ process in visual perception. The cost is a loss of particularity and uniqueness in perception and recall. For some, it is also regarded as inducing a sense of distance from the world. The way we categorize phenomena that we perceive is a ‘natural’ ‘reflection of reality’, leading us to forget the role of categorization in constructing our world.
• Perceiving things in a three dimensional plane is an artificial construct made up by certain learned ‘depth cues’. Linear perspective is only one kind of depth cue in a static two-dimensional image such as a painting, drawing or photograph. Relative size is another depth cue. Where an image features several objects of similar shape, the tendency is to assume that the smaller objects are further away. Height in field (or plane) is another cue to judging depth.
• Humans are driven by a desire to make meanings: above all, we are surely Homo significans – meaning-makers who make meaning through creation and interpretation of ‘signs’.
• Reading an image, is learned and is dependent on prior knowledge of possibilities; we can only recognize what we know.

A – Solomon’s ideas on Symbol Systems

Some questions raised:

• Within the definition of symbol systems as defined above, does text fit our definition of a ‘symbol system”?
• How can you be sure your words are being understood? What about the icons you may be using in text messages? are they UNIVERSALLY understood?
• What about fidelity (how true to reality —  clarity, resolution).. how much of a role does it play in perception? Is 100% fidelity necessary?

Some more….

• What is the effect of using highlighting in text passages or on PowerPoint presentations to focus attention?. How else can we focus attention in text-based communications? Can these sometimes get in the way, especially by those who are  literate in the topics?

B – Highlighting Textbooks.. a help or a hindrance?

Here is an interesting study into the effects of purchasing used textbooks with highlighting already in it

C – Highlighting Hyperlinks on Websites

Here is another discussion on the effect of highlighting hyperlinks on Web pages

10 Usability Tips on focusing attention

So What, then, is Visual Literacy?

Now that we have explored what visual language is, we need to gain an understanding about the concept of visual literacy.

Wikipedia is actually a great place to start:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_literacy

Of course an organization called the International Visual Literacy Association (IVLA) must be a place to find a good definition, no?

One last place to stop is the AT&T Learning Network

Story is most often taught in a descriptive mode. Students are asked (usually on standardized tests in PK-12) to list to name the basic elements of story (i.e., plot, character, setting, rising action, etc.) with the expectation that they will become better readers. Asking students to know/list these story parts, as you must know by now, is simply descriptive and is at the lowest level of the Bloom’s hierarchy of knowledge acquisition. VERY few can actually create stories even after these elements and their definitions have been memorized.

If you do not believe me, conduct a little survey of your own. Ask a friend, a child, an adult, whomever.. to tell you a story (I mean a REAL story.. with all the elements described below..) or go ask someone to ‘do’ arising and falling action…

This took me a very long time to figure out as well… then one day the light went off.. the result is what you see here in this lesson.. the idea is to get you to figure out the basic elements of story creation. We also want to bring it all home by showing you how this relates to learning and why story may just be the best construct ever devised by humans to teach and learn things.. This may be one of  the most important set of readings you will do this entire semester. I need to make a believer out of you and to get you to ‘buy’ into the concept of story being that vehicle that can be used in all academic areas as the great contextualizer for teaching and learning. In fact, this is the seed to the next course on Digital Narrative and Cognition that we put into the program recently.

so let’s begin our journey…

I am suggesting that there is a natural link between humans, story, and learning… to wit:

• Point #1:“Gregory Bateson
  

  In the 1950s he was asked if he thought artificial intelligence in computers was possible. He responded that he did not know for sure but if you asked a computer a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question and it responds with “that reminds me of a story”, then it would be close… now, this is quite telling… in other words, what separates humans from other beings/man-made devices is our natural inclination for storytelling…

• Point #2: Roger Schank
  

  Schank has been arguing for years that the road to understanding human intelligence is built upon story. He proposed that “the process of developing increasingly complex levels of stories applied in increasingly complex ways is one way to map intelligence.

• Point #3: Jean Mandler
  

  Mandler conducted considerable research into the constructs of story that remain seminal in the field even today.Her work on story constructs back in the 1980s predates all the recent publicity around ‘digital storytelling’.

• Point #4: Marshall McLuhan: Medium is the message (we will see him again later in the term)
  

  This is one of our lesson for this cycle.. McLuhan is the seminal guy when it comes to discussions on the effect of media on learning and communicating. His point is that the media a person uses not only helps describe define the message but also the people who most often utilize that media.

• Point #5: Janet Murray
  

  Janet Murray wrote Hamlet on the Holodeck, a review of how media has changed how we tell stories.. Hamlet representing the ‘old school’ and the holodeck (the story telling entry point (like the looking glass was for Alice in Wonderland) for Star Trek.

• Point #5: Walter Ong . (Same here.. we will visit Dr Ong’s work again later)
  

  Find out how Walter Ong ( a disciple of McLuhan’s) thinks about ‘secondary orality’ and how we are entering a new old age of storytellling

• Point #6: Eric Havelock
  

  (another colleague of McLuhan) had many ideas on how story structures thought. He posited that literature is different from ‘storying’… in the latter one participates whereas literature is passive. He also taught that the mind actually stores information in gist form. To reconstruct that into knowledge, the brain contextualizes it using story constructs.

 

These folks led me to believe the following:

 

• Because of pressures to remove story from the curriculum, we do not utilize story as a framework and we have begun to lose our ability to become good story creators.
• More and more people believe they do not have a story to tell.
• But the truth is we still have a deep intuitive sense of the power of story.
• My research provided me the opportunity to run into two individuals (Ruby Paine and Reuven Feuerstein) whose researched the causes of ‘second generational poverty’. Feuerstein, in particular, demonstrated a causal relationship between the lack of development of story structure, casual (as opposed to formal) language register, and academic failures. He and Paine suggest that for those with only a casual language register, their concept of story is episodic and random in which they very often omit consequences and cause and effect. Consequently, if a student has not had access to a formal story structure (that includes cause and effect, consequence and sequence, and is in an environment with no formal routine and structure), then that student does not know how to plan. This lack of planning capabilities correlates significantly to knowledge acquisition.According to Feuerstein:
  • If a student cannot plan, he or she cannot predict
  • If a student cannot predict, he or she cannot identify cause and effect
  • If a student cannot identify cause and effect, he or she cannot identify consequences
  • If a student cannot identify consequences, he or she cannot control impulsive behaviors
  • If a student cannot control impulsive behaviors, he or she most often demonstrates learning disabilities, and even worse, may even have an inclination to criminal behavior.

This is where you come in.. in this course we are going to base the learning principles of still and time-based, visual media on the power of the story construct. You need not only learn how to push the software buttons but you must also learn how to tell a story digitally using these products.. THAT is the link between technology and the classroom….

Let’s get to the basics…

Story Parts

Stories may:

• Be a propositional conclusion (this happened, therefore…)
• Represent a point of view (this is what I believe…)
• Change attitudes (convince you of my point of view…)

 

Story Elements

This is my obligatory reference to the old standardized testing ‘story’ but don’t worry, we get past this VERY quickly…

• Character
• Setting
• Plot
(rising action…blah, blah, blah)

 

Plot Parts.. another reference to standardized testing

Conflict – three parts

• Before: character learns of the need to do something, is influenced, hesitates, decides, or refuses.
• During: character performs the task(s), some succeed, others fail, etc.
• After: consequences of these actions

Results… moving (slowly) away from the sanitized version…

• Tragedy = conflict wins
• Comedy = character changes

 

Non – Stories.. these are hardly ever taught…

• Catalog: lists that are related at their center.
• Episode: a collection of consequences of a central situation.
• Unfocused chain: a list of causes and effects with no center.
• Focused chain: a series of episodes 
(e.g. continuing adventures of a character)
• Simple narrative: a collection of focused chains.
• Catalog: lists that are similarly related at their center.
• Episode: a collection of consequences of a central situation.
• Unfocused chain: a list of causes and effects with no center.
• Focused chain: a series of episodes 
(e.g. continuing adventures of a character)
• Simple narrative: a collection of focused chains.

Character – a finite number exists

• Types (there is a very finite list of standard archetypes.. (some believe only 25 specific types.. 10 males and 10 females, plus about 5 different types of ‘supporting roles (best friends who influence action and decision making).. if you do not believe me.. watch a few episodes of Star wars, or call George Lucas and ask him what he thinks about all this)
• Values.. the basic character values/ethics mode of operation of the character.. easily identifiable so that the archetypes differentiate from one another.
• Allowable actions.. in building a video game, designers build this is.. a character in a game can only do what his or her character type allows them to do.. the goal of the player/learner is to figure this out…

 

Plot – a finite number (also) exists

• How many are there?  here are differing points of view on this….
  1. 31 processes – Propp’s Wonder Tales
  2. 20 Master plots – Tobias

 

Conflict.. this is what disrupts the norm.. in learning terminology, see Piaget’s views on disequilibrium

• Possible alternatives are not compatible with character’s values.
• The moral/teachable moment is how the conflict is attempted to be solved – the character is torn.

 

But the most over-looked part of any story is the reader in a story or player in a video game or the viewer in a video/movie:

• Plays a role in interpretation of events
• A narrative has many unsaid things and it is up to the reader/viewer/player to reconstruct them based on the pieces given
• In other words.. every story teller needs a story listener/viewer.. when you create your stories think of this fact….

 

Now, this is the heart of the story creation process and what makes story the purest contextualizer/construct for knowledge acquisition…

 

Plot Generation –Brannigan, 1992.. according the Branigan…

 

1. Story is a way of organizing spatial and temporal data into (time and space… i.e., the setting)
2.  cause-effect chain  of events with a beginning-middle-end that (highlighted for a reason.. this is what creates learning opportunities.. look at science, for example.. it is ALL about cause ad effect.. so is history.. even math for that matter…)
3. embodies a judgment about the nature of the events as well as (one absolutely needs to recognize the disruption, otherwise no judgments can be made)
4. demonstrates how it is possible to know (i.e, narrate) the events.(what makes it credible to the reader/viewer/learner/… that which causes the suspension of disbelief a la Brenda Laurel)

So there you have it THE  FOUR CRITICAL ELEMENTS OF STORY CREATION … each of them is necessary but insufficient.. all four MUST be present tor a story to occur…

Story as Transformation

In all stories a change usually occurs…

• A pie recipe is temporal but NOT a story of a pie because the sequence is not based on cause and effect.
• Some person, object, or situation undergoes a change, as measured by a sequence of attributions (judgements),
• which are applied at different times, and a value judgment is inferred (i.e., the moral of the story).

 

Todorov’s ideas on transformation:

• A state of equilibrium at the outset (A)
• A disruption (B)
• A recognition that there has been a disruption (-A)
• An attempt to repair the disruption (-B)
• A reinstatement of the initial equilibrium (A)

These changes are not random but are produced according to principles of cause and effect.

A transformation is necessary but insufficient:

These changes are not random but are produced according to principles of cause and effect, and there is a judgment/moral attribute (in this case, it is implied, not stated).

Kinds of Causes .. this is also very important… what makes the disruption a critical part of the story…

• Includes a judgment as to relative likelihood that particular events might happen together:
• Consecutive (arbitrary)
• Chronological ((then… then…. then) order governed by time))
• Conventional (the order is set by familiar social, generic practices)
• Mediated (video games cause violent behaviors?)
• Enabling (element is necessary for the purpose of another)
• Direct (element is sufficient)
• Unique (element is necessary and sufficient)

How many causes?

• A good story mixes two of the causalities:
• Permits more moral implications and plausibility
• AND
• Also blocks out other possible combinations… else the story can be confusing and amoralistic

 

Kinds of stories

• Character Stories
• Memorial Stories
• Adventure Stories
• Accomplishment Stories
• The Story about a place in my life
• Story about what I do & how I make change happen
• Recovery Stories
• Love Stories

http://storiesforchange.net

or

Simply Google “story and change” and you will be surprised how many hits come up

Seeing as learning is all about ‘change’ then the relevance of learning about change stories should become obvious. Further, learning about the change process and seeing how good story constructs involve a change or transformation that the main character undergoes or is required to face, makes this activity one that could be quite useful to you, not only in the K-12 classroom but also in business and industry. This will all unfold as we progress through the semester.

Tell a Story Instead

In case you need any further motivation to use story as a basis for your lesson content, here is one poster that you should keep around as a reminder:

Tell_a_Story_Instead

Some of you may be wondering why we decided to begin this course here. The truth is everything we do in life boils down to being able to not only work but survive in the world in which we live. Whether you realize it or not, the entire universe is made up of a spectrum of electrons that man has been able to capture and ‘tame’. Without it we simply cannot survive… everything we see, hear, and do requires the proper management of things unseen.

But we HAVE figured out how to demonstrate the universe visually. Check it out by clicking the plus sign below:

Just to give you an idea as to how important is this to our very existence (especially now that we have digitized just about everything), 21st century warfare has gone technical with the emergence of the electromagnetic Bomb (EMB) that, without actually destroying physical property, could result in the shutting down of everything need to survive.

Ok, scary to say the least. But this course is not about the destruction of the world but of how the analog world works so you get an idea as to how we go about digitizing it.

Electromagnetic Spectrum

As shown above a part of the infospehere we live in can be (and has been) tamed for human consumption and use. The visualization of the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum shown below represents the range of all types of EM radiation. Radiation is energy that travels and spreads out as it goes. The visible light that comes from a lamp in your house and the radio waves that come from a radio station are just two types of electromagnetic radiation. It is all the same, just captured (sampled) at different wave lengths. That is why, for example, we can utilize light (on CDs and DVDs) to capture, store, and produce sound. Because of the current state of technology the converse of this process cannot at present be done (use captured sound waves to produce light) but I wonder if someday that, too, may be overcome. The other types of EM radiation that make up the electromagnetic spectrum are microwaves, infrared light, ultraviolet light, X-rays and gamma-rays.

What All This Means for Us

There are some who propose that everything is analog because without it we would not be able to hear digitized sound or see digitized images because humans can only sense the analog world. This is true now but we do not know about the future and whether the next evolution of humans will actually be a hybrid of the two. Some (like Time Magazine recently) predict that occur in about 2045 when humans and computers become one. [one_third]—[/one_third][one_third][/one_third][one_third_last]—[/one_third_last]
Until that time, lets just say that we need to understand the analog to digital back to analog process in order to understand how the technology works and how we digitize both still and moving media in order to make it useful for our teaching.

Basic Signal Theory

Whether we start with audio/sound (which we do) signals are basically air that is moving very quickly. Electromagnetic radiation is often described by its frequency—the number of oscillations of the perpendicular electric and magnetic fields per second—expressed in hertz. Radio frequency radiation is usually measured in kilohertz (kHz), megahertz (MHz), or gigahertz (GHz). Frequencies are measured in Hz ( short for ‘Hertz’ (not the rental guy). We know that most can hear frequencies in the range between 100Hz-15000Hz. Some people can hear very high frequencies above 19000Hz, but scientists always assume that the human ear is able to discern frequencies between 20Hz-20000Hz, since those numbers make their calculations a lot easier. Visible light is also an electromagnetic wave. The frequency of the wave determines its color: 4×1014 Hz is red light, 8×1014 Hz is violet light, and between these (in the range 4-8×1014 Hz) are all the other colors of the rainbow. An electromagnetic wave can have a frequency less than 4×1014 Hz, but it will be invisible to the human eye; such waves are called infrared (IR) radiation. At even lower frequency, the wave is called a microwave, and at still lower frequencies it is called a radio wave. Likewise, an electromagnetic wave can have a frequency higher than 8×1014 Hz, but it will be invisible to the human eye; such waves are called ultraviolet (UV) radiation. Even higher-frequency waves are called X-rays, and higher still are gamma rays.

So as you can see, whether it is an analog transaction or digital, it all boils down to our being able to measure, capture, store, and reproduce the appropriate part of the spectrum and is why most believe digital is really analog, just that the four transactions are done using different means.

Your final project is a book trailer. As we discussed, a  book trailer is a 2-3 minute re-enactment of the main storyline of the book. You are not talking about the book or trying to sell a movie made out of a book. Nor is this a commercial in the strict sense. Yes, you want to motivate potential readers but you need to be honest to the book’s content. What the site (http://digitalbooktalk.net) is all about is to entice readers to read and complete books. As such, you do not want to trick a reader into reading the book by intimating or implying that something is in the book that is not… nor can you make anything up, like what some movie makers do when they make movies out of books.  A complete description about what book trailers are can be found on the digital booktalk site .

A couple of things to keep in mind…

• The best trailers have some type of re-enactment in them in which the talent re-enacts a main scene that demonstrates the main “cause and effect’ scenario / transformation that the main character is pushed to go through.
• While the ’cause’ is almost always present, the ‘effect’ (moral of the story) does not have to be, but is almost always alluded to..
• Don’t be ‘cheesy’ with the ending.. i.e., do not use the over-used ending “READ THE BOOK TO FIND OUT”.. or “COMING TO A BOOKSTORE NEAR YOU” remember.. this is NOT a commercial.. we do not care WHICH book a student reads as long as He or SHE picks one and COMPLETES IT. we are after wise choices in selecting books so as to encourage BOOK COMPLETION

Good luck and have fun!!!!

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Your objective is to create a trailer that will actually be posted to the site. As such all content, including imagery, video clips, and music must be original or copy right free.

Here is a place to secure images and video:
http://www.sxc.hu/

As far as music is concerned, I have made arrangements to get access to lots of good usable music from soundzabounds.

To get access to this music:
log in using rkenny as the user name and rfk123456 as the password

Building your 2-minute Trailer

Which elements do we need to include?

• Introduce setting/character (short form)
• Identify source of conflict/disruption & possible alternative(s)
• Have an epic finish without giving resolution

You may invert the order by giving result and then begging the question as to how this all came about.

In other words, have a beginning-middle-end, but they do not necessarily have to be presented in that order.

Hints

• Use the recipe (4 C’s) !!!!from the storytelling lesson
• Tell your story visually… use text as a crutch to make efficient
• Use transitions and colors for a purpose
• Vary your tempo:  dramatic beats
• Coordinate your music – an important addition to the visual
• Credits – where did the music, images etc, come from?
• Have an epic finish

Here is the rubric we will be using is Live text as the critical task for this course. It should give you an idea as to what we are looking for. More details to follow:

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