\nIf you are starting to get the sense that the various proponents of these various ‘ecosystems’ are in competition with one another you are not being paranoid. Certainly, that is emerging out of our readings and an undertone in the literature when comparing to one another .. while that does add drama, it also adds to the fun of the explorational journey we are on.. the proponents are making it easy for us to develop our notebooks because the comparisons are an integral part of their arguments… giving us fodder to decide on which medium you end up favoring when making choices for your classrooms. I ask you not to give into the temptation of choosing sides right yet. You end up coming off sounding pedantic\/preachy. Stick to your guns and make an honest comparison so that you can fully develop your technology tool box for your teaching and match the correct media to your teaching goals and expected outcomes<\/p>\n
Use the arguments your advantage to uncover the characteristics of each media type and see how it alters your views and answers to the questions\/prompts in your chart.<\/p>\n
Don’t forget to go back to previous charts and update your entries as you begin to see where you might have overlooked something. As you go through these do not forget to also search Google Scholar for articles… that is a rich source for content that may be more in line with your filling in the holes in your charts that may not be found in the materials provided.<\/p>\n
There is a lot more reading here than it looks. The content of this module is intended to help you ‘kick start’ your investigation. It is expected that you will have to do a lot of digging one your own to answer all the appropriate questions for your profile
\n<\/div><\/div><\/p>\n
To help you know what to read for in the sections that follow, you should first wish to look at the “Do This” box<\/a> at the end of this lesson before begin reading.<\/strong> Author Profile:<\/strong> Frank Rose<\/strong> is a senior fellow at the Columbia University School of the Arts, where he leads an executive education seminar in digital storytelling strategy. <\/p>\n The following is an excerpt from the following book: The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories<\/em> (Norton, 2011).<\/p>\n Interest in immersion is largely a by-product of the digital age. Video games and the Internet have taught people to be active participants rather than passive observers<\/span><\/strong><\/span>; just looking is no longer enough.<\/p>\n Although digital technology seems to encourage it, immersion can be triggered by almost any form of media<\/span><\/strong><\/span>, starting with books and theater. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, new technologies yielded experiences that were even more immersive than serialized novels. Lithographs gave way to photographs, which in turn gave rise to stereographs\u2014cards with twin photos, viewed with a headset for a 3D effect<\/span><\/strong><\/span>. After the Civil War, there was a brief vogue for cycloramas, which were massively scaled reproductions of battles, volcanic eruptions, even the Crucifixion<\/span><\/strong><\/span>. Then moving pictures were invented, creating an effect so realistic that these static illusions came to appear superficial and tawdry. In 1938, Orson Welles inadvertently demonstrated the immersive power of radio drama when his broadcast of H.G. Wells\u2019s The War of the Worlds triggered panic among listeners. Meanwhile, John D. Rockefeller Jr. was pouring millions into the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg, a once-sleepy Virginia town that would soon offer time travel to pre-Revolutionary America.<\/p>\n A significant inflection point came with the arrival of Star Wars. George Lucas\u2019s 1977 movie and the five sequels and prequels that followed it took place in a meticulously detailed fictional world, and they generated massive sales of ancillary products\u2014comics, novelizations, TV shows, action figures, video games\u2014that deepened fans\u2019 involvement. This inspired an entire generation of current-day Hollywood writers and directors who saw Star Wars as kids\u2014among them Joss Whedon, writer\u2013director of The Avengers, and Lost co-creators J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof. For people like these, says television writer\u2013producer Adam Horowitz, \u201cStar Wars was a gateway drug.\u201d<\/p>\n Certainly it was for James Cameron, who saw Star Wars when he was a 22-year-old truck driver and credits it with inspiring him to become a movie director. By 2009, when he released Avatar, all those Star Wars products had been transformed from a string of uncoordinated one-offs to a family of product lines that told a coherent story spread over thousands of years. Not only did the products fuel fan loyalty that spanned generations; they were also enormously successful commercially, far more so than even the movies. Cameron took note.<\/p>\n \u201cI think the role of this type of film should be to create a kind of fractal-like complexity,\u201d he told me when Avatar was still in development. \u201cThe casual viewer can enjoy it without having to drill down to the secondary and tertiary levels of detail. But for a real fan, you go in an order of magnitude and, boom! There\u2019s a whole set of new patterns.\u201d Around the same time, Cameron championed 3D because he sought another form of immersion\u2014a cinematic effect that would eliminate the audience\u2019s perception that they were looking at a screen, which he viewed not as a window but as a barrier.<\/p>\n At the moment, however, it seems that 3D is about to be eclipsed by virtual reality (VR), an even more immersive technology that provides a computer-simulated environment in a totally enclosed stereoscopic software-driven headset. Given the current, highly advanced state of computer graphics, the effect of virtual reality can be startlingly realistic. To experience a Game of Thrones demo for the Oculus Rift\u2014a still-in-development headset produced by Oculus VR (a Kickstarter-funded startup that Facebook bought in March 2014 for $2 billion)\u2014you step into an iron cage and \u201cride\u201d a primitive, hand-winched, simulated elevator rising up a 700-foot-high wall of ice. This sort of thing is a far cry from old-fashioned TV, but it can have its downside: People testing an Oculus Rift game based on Alien, Ridley Scott\u2019s 1979 sci-fi\/horror film, have been known to rip off their headsets and run screaming out of the room in fear.<\/p>\n Another new form of immersion is almost the opposite of virtual reality. Known as \u201cubiquitous technology\u201d or the Internet of Things, it involves placing electronic devices in real-world settings, where they interact with people and with one another. (See \u201cA Strategist\u2019s Guide to the Internet of Things,\u201d by Frank Burkitt, s+b, Winter 2014.) Retail stores, for example, use RFID tags and other devices to respond to shoppers directly, immersing them in a manufactured reality as detailed and sometimes as surreal as any you would find in a headset.<\/p>\n From 3D to VR, the goal is to eliminate any barrier between person and experience. It\u2019s worth remembering that media is derived from the Latin for middle: A medium is what comes between us and the information it conveys. What if we could have an unmediated experience\u2014movies without a screen, theater without a proscenium, art without a frame? \u201cWe\u2019re never going to be totally immersive as long as we\u2019re looking at a square,\u201d Steven Spielberg said in 2013 in a discussion with Lucas at the University of Southern California. \u201cWe\u2019ve got to get rid of that and put the player inside the experience, where no matter where you look, you\u2019re surrounded by a three-dimensional experience. That\u2019s the future.\u201d<\/p>\n It is often assumed that the more advanced the technology, the more immersive the experience. Not so. Even with VR, the immersive quality of a story depends less on technology than on the artistry with which the story is told and the technology deployed. We become immersed because that artistry taps into an aspect of human nature that goes far beyond the mere desire to be entertained.<\/p>\n Recent brain studies suggest that stories, whether written or staged or viewed on a screen, provide a rehearsal for real-life events and interactions<\/span><\/strong><\/span>. In a 2009 paper in the journal Psychological Science, for example, psychologists at Washington University in St. Louis described a neuroimaging experiment that involved people reading stories about a 7-year-old schoolboy named Raymond. Functional MRIs revealed that when test subjects reached a passage in which Raymond picked up his workbook, they experienced activity in regions of the brain that are associated with grasping motions. When he shook his head no, the part of the brain that\u2019s believed to deal with goal-directed activity lit up. When he walked up to his teacher\u2019s desk, areas thought to deal with location in space were activated.<\/p>\n According to Toronto-based cognitive psychologists Raymond Mar and Keith Oatley, such studies show that, like computer simulations, \u201cstories model and abstract the human social world.\u201d In a landmark paper called \u201cThe Function of Fiction,\u201d the two asserted that stories, far from representing the simple retelling of events, are highly selective accounts. They have to be, since even \u201cthe most trivial of experiences, such as going to buy a newspaper, is replete with details that could fill volumes.\u201d Because they are abstractions, stories demand that readers \u201cproject themselves into the represented events\u201d in order to understand what\u2019s going on. If this analysis is correct, then immersion would simply be an extreme form of that projection.<\/p>\n In his book On the Origin of Stories, University of Auckland professor Brian Boyd argues that this bent for immersion is rooted deep in the human psyche<\/span><\/strong><\/span>. Fiction, he asserts, trains us to quickly understand real-life social situations, to make inferences, to see situations from other people\u2019s point of view\u2014and it encourages us to do this not just once, but over and over. This last point is critical: \u201cBecause it entices us again and again to immerse ourselves in story,\u201d Boyd maintains, fiction \u201chelps us over time to rehearse and refine our apprehension of events.<\/span><\/strong><\/span>\u201d Stories contain lessons, and by immersing themselves in stories people learn those lessons more effectively, just as they would a foreign language. This suggests that our innate desire to immerse ourselves in stories is not some frivolous impulse but a fundamental adaptive response.<\/p>\n It also turns out to be extraordinarily effective at altering attitudes and beliefs. People have always suspected as much\u2014why else would books be banned or burned?\u2014but until social psychologists Melanie Green and Timothy Brock started conducting experiments at Ohio State in the late 1990s, little had been done to determine how or even whether stories affect people\u2019s feelings about events, issues, or products in the real world.<\/p>\n To investigate the issue, Green and Brock asked test subjects to read a story about a little girl in a shopping mall being randomly and brutally stabbed to death by a psychiatric patient. The story is vividly told and intensely engrossing, all the more so because it is recounted in a dispassionate manner. Some participants were told it was true, others that it was fiction. Some were questioned, well before they read it, about the issues it raised\u2014whether psychiatric patients should be allowed in the community, how likely violence is to occur in public places, whether we live in a fundamentally just world. And all were asked these questions after they\u2019d read it. The researchers wanted to know if people who were deeply immersed in the story would react differently from those who were not.<\/p>\n First, of course, they had to figure out which readers were immersed\u2014or \u201ctransported,\u201d as they called it. They had to quantify enchantment. To do that, Green and Brock developed a \u201ctransportation scale\u201d that has since become the standard measure of immersion. Participants are given 15 statements on the order of \u201cI wanted to learn how the narrative ended\u201d and \u201cWhile reading the narrative I had a vivid image\u201d of a particular scene or character. For each statement, they are asked to rank their responses on a seven-point scale, from \u201cnot at all\u201d to \u201cvery much.\u201d Emotional involvement is a key factor in the final score, as is how readily people can project themselves into the story.<\/p>\n For people reading about the little girl being stabbed, the immersion score ranged from 31 to 99, out of a potential high of 105. The more they were transported by the story, the more likely readers were to express opinions that were consistent with it\u2014that mental patients should not be let out unsupervised, for example\u2014and the less likely they were to find fault with its point of view. It made no difference whether they\u2019d been told the story was fact or fiction.<\/p>\n Subsequent research has led to similar results. A series of experiments at Dartmouth, for example, showed that people tend to spontaneously assume the identity of the main character in a story they are immersed in\u2014and the more thoroughly they do so, the more likely they are to change their attitudes and behavior in the aftermath. Those with low self-awareness\u2014extroverts, in other words\u2014were more likely than others to project themselves into the story, and all test subjects were more inclined to merge identities with characters who resembled them in some way. But the way the story was told made a big difference. Whites reading about a black person or straights reading about a gay person were more likely to emerge with a favorable attitude about that character if they didn\u2019t find out the character was black or gay until well into the story. Prejudice could block immersion\u2014but immersion, once achieved, trumped prejudice.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not hard to see why stories are so powerful. Advocacy messages, whether for a cause or a brand, automatically invite scrutiny. They prompt us to put our guard up. Stories are different. Not only do stories encourage people to identify with the characters they portray, but by inducing the willing suspension of disbelief they leave the audience predisposed to accept their premise, at least temporarily. We leave our day-to-day existence behind when we enter a story\u2014and when we return to the \u201cprimary world,\u201d as Tolkien called it in an essay called \u201cOn Fairy-Stories,\u201d we come back altered by the experience.<\/p>\n This has ramifications far beyond fairy tales. \u201cGiven the implications of stories for the narrative persuasion of consumers,\u201d notes Tom van Laer, a lecturer in marketing at Cass Business School in London, \u201cnothing is less innocent than a story.\u201d And the more immersive the story, the less innocent it is. In the 38 years since the premiere of Star Wars, digital technology\u2014in the form of video games and the Internet in particular\u2014has increasingly conditioned people to want to immerse themselves in stories. Meanwhile, the advertising industry has developed a problem: Consumers have stopped responding to their traditional approach. According to Nielsen\u2019s most recent \u201cGlobal Trust in Advertising and Brand Messages\u201d report (published September 2013), more than half of Europeans and a third of Americans distrust ads in any medium. Young people are particularly resistant. A 2014 survey by the McCarthy Group, a public relations and strategic marketing firm, found that 84 percent of U.S. millennials dislike advertising and are unlikely to be persuaded by it.<\/p>\n This is, of course, the same generation that JWT found so responsive to immersive experiences. But immersion is not achieved through assault; it\u2019s achieved by inducing surrender. What\u2019s needed, then, is a new approach. \u201cSignals that evolve through competition tend to be costly, as arms races develop between insistent senders and resistant receivers,\u201d writes Boyd. \u201cSignals used for cooperative purposes, by contrast\u2014\u2018conspiratorial whispers\u2019\u2014will be energetically cheap and informationally rich.\u201d<\/p>\n With the advent of social media, the hard sell and even the soft sell are giving way to Boyd\u2019s conspiratorial whisper. Storytelling is key, but as with any key it only gets you in the door. What people really want is to merge their identity with something larger. They want to enter the world the story lives in.<\/p>\n To some, this was apparent decades ago: Walt Disney began encouraging people to step into his stories when he opened Disneyland in 1955. So it is entirely in character that the Walt Disney Company now offers a product line designed to \u201callow families to immerse themselves,\u201d as the press release put it, in its 3D animated hit Frozen, a movie that pulled in nearly $1.3 billion worldwide at the box office. The studio has surrounded the film with consumer products that evoke it, including costumes that encourage role-play and a mobile app that brings kids into the narrative from the point of view of either of the two sisters at the heart of the story. For grown-up animation fans, Disney has the Art of Animation Resort in Florida, a hotel designed (as the website puts it) to \u201cimmerse you in the magic\u201d\u2014quite literally, since it features an enormous swimming pool with underwater speakers that play audio from Finding Nemo.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Bloomberg Media has opened what it calls \u201can immersive, technology-driven brand experience\u201d at London City Airport, a major hub for European business travelers. Rather than slap up some ads in the airport\u2019s desultory lounge\u2014the default solution\u2014Bloomberg opted to turn the lounge itself into an ad, with free Wi-Fi and a huge electronic media wall with a digital ticker carrying a constant stream of data. Walking into the lounge is like entering a Bloomberg-branded corner of cyberspace, a spot where you can merge with the endless stream of digital information.<\/p>\n But one of the best examples of an immersive brand experience is provided by Burberry, the once-moribund British fashion label. Two years ago, after creating a highly successful online environment called \u201cBurberry World,\u201d the company brought it to life in its new flagship store on London\u2019s Regent Street. Set in an impeccably restored 19th-century retail emporium, the store consciously blurs the digital and the physical, with mirrors that turn into screens, RFID tags that trigger pop-up videos about craftsmanship, enormous screens that pulse with celebrations of old-fashioned British tailoring, and live shows from the likes of Jake Bugg, a 20-year-old folk singer from the council houses of Nottingham. Music and craft become part of a saga that acts as the fabric of the brand. As Burberry creative director and CEO Christopher Bailey said in a 2013 interview, \u201cIt\u2019s not just a coat. That coat has a story\u201d\u2014and that story serves as an entry point for the Burberry sensibility. \u201cPeople want the soul in things. They want to understand the whys and the whats and the values that surround it.\u201d<\/p>\n Kate Spade, Disney, Bloomberg, Burberry\u2014for each of these companies, the meaning of the brand is conveyed not through ad messaging but through an immersive environment. The most compelling of these environments are rich with detail, but the stories they carry are often implicit, communicated by subtle cues and left for the audience to piece together.<\/p>\n In an environment such as this, suspension of disbelief is critical. All stories involve a partnership between author and audience: As the author tells the story, those in the audience conjure it up, even\u2014if current neuroscience theories are correct\u2014running a simulation in their head. For the simulation to work, all the details count; they either reinforce our belief in the artificial world or diminish it.<\/p>\n Authenticity is equally crucial. If the story world does not reflect the genuine identity of the company, it will be as obvious as an ill-fitting wig. When the Virgin Group\u2014an idiosyncratic conglomerate made up of businesses that include health clubs, banking, air travel, and space tourism\u2014tried to sort out its corporate identity a few years ago, its leaders realized that there was a paradox at the heart of the company. This paradox is personified by Virgin\u2019s maverick founder, Sir Richard Branson: hippie adventurer, successful businessman, campaigner for social good, profit-driven capitalist. Codified as the \u201cVirgin Way,\u201d that essential insight became the story the company tells itself to make sure it\u2019s on the right path. Companies whose leaders can\u2019t quite decide \u201cwho we are\u201d will not have such a guidepost.<\/p>\n Beyond that, stories need to offer multiple opportunities for social engagement. Audiences today are assuming the role they had before the advent of mass media in the 19th century: They are becoming active participants in the storytelling process rather than passive consumers. They expect to share their involvement online, and smart marketers will come up with innovative ways to encourage them.<\/p>\n Lionsgate\u2019s tremendous success with the Hunger Games franchise\u2014the first two films took in nearly $1.6 billion in worldwide box office receipts, and a third film opened to massive numbers in November 2014\u2014is due in large part to its adroit use of social media as an information channel to keep fans continually engaged. With 2 million Facebook fans and nearly 1.3 million Twitter followers, even conventional marketing moves, like the release of a poster or trailer, become major events. In fact, the person in charge of social media for the franchise is known within the company as \u201cthe fan whisperer.\u201d<\/p>\n But fans\u2019 involvement goes far deeper than Facebook and Twitter. To encourage people to register with the franchise, Lionsgate invites them to sign up as residents of one of the 12 outlying districts that provide the teenage combatants for the annual fight-to-the-death competition that is the film\u2019s namesake. Fans are then assigned roles\u2014district organizer, for example\u2014and set in competition against fans from other districts. By the time the first movie opened, more than 800,000 people had gotten their ID cards. So thoroughly has the fictional world of The Hunger Games bled into the real world that this past summer, protesters against the military coup in Thailand adopted the three-fingered mocking jay salute used by the rebels in the story. And as in the fictional world, the salute was promptly forbidden by the real-life authorities.<\/p>\n At the same time, any immersive experience has to work at varying levels of depth. Story worlds can\u2019t be hermetic; they need to be porous enough for people to pass in and out of them at will. A fair number of Hunger Games fans are only going to want to see the movie\u2014and many Burberry customers will be happy just to purchase a trench coat. They should have that option.<\/p>\n But the most fundamental requirement for immersion may also be the hardest to achieve: the conspiratorial whisper. The time when brand marketers and entertainment executives could dictate what people see, hear, and think is long past, if it ever existed at all. Now they invite people into their world and hope enough will stay to make the effort worthwhile. \u201cFantasy,\u201d Tolkien wrote, \u201cis a natural human activity.\u201d But like Tinker Bell, it can survive only so long as people believe. When the spell is broken, the audience snaps back to reality. The job of the 21st-century marketer is to make sure that does not happen.<\/p>\n Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Belknap Press, 2009): A literary\u2013Darwinist inquiry into the genesis and purpose of narrative.<\/p>\n Melanie C. Green and Timothy C. Brock, \u201cThe Role of Transportation in the Persuasiveness of Public Narratives,\u201d Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Nov. 2000: A key paper in the research on immersive narratives.<\/p>\n Raymond A. Mar and Keith Oatley, \u201cThe Function of Fiction Is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience,\u201d Perspectives on Psychological Science, May 2008: Argues that stories are a simulation of reality.<\/p>\n Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Free Press, 1997): Exploration of digital environments as a compelling new medium for storytelling.<\/p>\n Frank Rose, The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories (Norton, 2011): The author of this article explains how narrative developed in the industrial age and where it is going today.<\/p>\n Nicole M. Speer et al., \u201cReading Stories Activates Neural Representations of Visual and Motor Experiences,\u201d Psychological Science, Aug. 2009: Research suggesting that readers understand a story by simulating events in the story world.<\/p>\n J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories (Harper Collins, 2008): Essay (adapted from a 1939 speech) on the nature of fantasy writing by one of the great masters of immersion.<\/div><\/div>\n Article published by Chris Dede Harvard University College of Education<\/p>\n
\n<\/div><\/div>
\n
\nOne of the better introductions comes from a very unlikely source… a businessman who writes a book to introduce business people to the power of immersive media for their use to market their products. <\/p>\nFirst some random quotes:<\/h4>\n
\nE<\/span>ngagement takes place when a story, or a marketing message, provokes some sort of action<\/span><\/strong><\/span> among the audience\u2014a tweet, a post, a face-to-face conversation over the water cooler. Immersion takes place when the audience forgets that it is an audience at all<\/span><\/strong><\/span>. Immersion blurs the lines<\/span><\/strong><\/span>\u2014between story and marketing, storyteller and audience, illusion and reality.<\/p>\nThe Enchanted State<\/h3>\n
\n
\nPeople have been immersing themselves in stories for centuries. In the classic early-17th-century satire by Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote goes tilting at windmills because he has so immersed himself in tales of chivalry that he loses his mind and thinks he is living in a bygone age. More than two centuries after the publication of Don Quixote, critics attacked Charles Dickens for publishing his novels in serial form, causing the \u201cdelirium of feverish interest\u201d they induced to bleed into his readers\u2019 daily lives, where they would leave little time for other, presumably more useful pursuits. Given the enormous international popularity of the true-crime podcast Serial, which achieved 5 million downloads and streams from Apple\u2019s app store in record time, Dickens\u2019s critics may have had a point.<\/p>\nThe Neuroscience of Immersion<\/h3>\n
\nThe Conspiratorial Whisper<\/p>\nResources You Can Use<\/h3>\n
Two More Thought-Leadership ideas on this Topic<\/h3>\n
Download Link: http:\/\/emeclasses.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/Immersive-Interfaces-for-Learning.pdf<\/a><\/h4>\n
\nImmersive-Interfaces-for-Learning<\/a>
\n<\/div><\/div>\nLet’s relook at the article about time and space perception and see if you can correlate it to the experience of immersion<\/h3>\n
Download Link: http:\/\/emeclasses.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/timeandspaceperception.pdf<\/a><\/h4>\n
\ntimeandspaceperception<\/a>
\n<\/div><\/div>
\n
\nFor our purposes, we can consider Virtual Reality (VR) as a subset of immersive learning… unless your research encourages you to consider it to be a completely different ecosystem… if so, all you need to do is demonstrate why by creating a separate chapter for it in your notebook. Your entries will make your case for you because one of the things we want you to do is to compare\/contrast.<\/p>\nSome additional articles that will help you work on your profile<\/h3>\n
\n
![\"senseofplace\"](\"http:\/\/emeclasses.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/senseofplace.jpg\")
<\/a><\/td>\n![\"disconnect-flweekly\"](\"http:\/\/emeclasses.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/disconnect-flweekly-300x236.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"dothis\"](\"http:\/\/emeclasses.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/dothis.gif\")
<\/a>