Web2 0storytelling 2009

Teaching and Storytelling with Web 2.0: The state of the art, and on a budget, too Bryan Alexander, NITLE Educause ‘09

How to use today’s session
We consider:
Low- or no-cost tools
Practical pedagogies
Concepts to build upon
A spectrum of project sizes

The slide of no work
“ How does this stuff impact me, if I don’t plan on making or helping make anything?”
Object of academic study
A growing body of stories being consumed and co-created
Influence on other areas: news, publishing, entertainment, infotainment
New media platforms emerging, driven by storytelling needs and possibilities

An emergent set of storytelling practices, growing out of Web 2.0 technologies and cultural forms.

What's web 2.0 about?
Quick recap
Microcontent
Social software
Perpetual beta

What's web 2.0 about?
Quick recap
Multiply authored content
within content
located externally
Boundaries can be hard to find

But wait, what's storytelling?
“ The last man on Earth sat alone in a room.”

But wait, what's storytelling?
“ The last man on Earth sat alone in a room.
There was a knock on the door.”
(Fredric Brown, “Knock”, 1948)

The pull of mystery, sometimes
“ It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
“ Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
“ As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. “
“ The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

Or Freytag, sometimes
Delight and instruct

Or the personal, sometimes
Delight and instruct
Stories are:
About someone important
About an important event
About what one does
From the CDS Cookbook http://www.storycenter.org/cookbook.html

But wait, what's storytelling? Exercise one: what isn’t storytelling? Use whatever communication tools you like. Except smoke signals.

What came before Web 2.0 storytelling?
Web 1.0 storytelling, of course
Hypertext
Multimedia
Evanescent
Browser-focused
Connected with offline, analog content (textbooks)

Web 1.0 storytelling
Example: Dreaming Methods (2000ff)
http://www.dreamingmethods.com/

Example: “Ted’s Caving Journal” (circa 2001)
(one copy, from http://www.angelfire.com/trek/caver/page1.html )

Features:
Multilinear
Multimedia
Browserish
Serial structure

Web 1.0 era storytelling
Email chain letters, jokes
Social
Boundaries fuzzy
Microcontent
Virtual community facilitation (1980s on)
(Snopes.com)

( http://www.thenation.com/blogs/jstreet/363133/bailout_satire ) Dear American: I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude. I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you. I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe. This is a matter of great urgency…

Digital storytelling roots
Digital Storytelling movement (CDS)
Digital Storytelling at Ukaiah, 2006

Digital storytelling offshoots
Educational projects growing
Community
Curricula
Support
( http://connect.educause.edu/Library/Abstract/StorytellingintheAgeofthe/42327 )

So why Web 2.0 storytelling?
It’s already being done.
http://delicious.com/tag/web2storytelling

Focused platforms
Character (Twitter, blog, MySpace, audio)
Setting (wiki, images, audio (Myna, Freesound))
Objects (images, video)
Events (blog, podcast)

More multimedia platforms
VoiceThread
Video (Jaycut, Windows Moviemaker)
Gaming [recent LET+Venatio Creo+Inform 7]

She's a Flight Risk http://esquire.com/features/articles/2003/030922_mfe_isabella_1.html
Blog as story diary

Bookblogging
http://www.pulsethebook.com/ - “networked book” (Institute for the Future of the Book)
Publishing new content, in development

Rebookblogging?
Republication of pre-existing content
Pedagogy
Social feedback
Publicity

Pepys Diary
Dracula Blogged
Ulysses and da Vinci per day
( http://hdt.typepad.com/henrys_blog/ )

( http://spoonriver.metblogs.com/ )
Creative writing in response to document:
Spoon River Metblog

Platforms
Blogosphere and nonfiction character
“ As one day’s posts build on points raised or refuted in a previous day’s, readers must actively engage the process of “discovering” the author, and of parsing from fragment after fragment who is speaking to them, and why, and from where whether geographically, mentally, politically, or otherwise.”
-Steve Himmer, “The Labyrinth Unbound” (2003)

Microbloglosphere
Twitter: a single narrative
Good Captain
http://twitter.com/goodcaptain
http://loose-fish.com/

Twitter:
Aphorism
http://twitter.com/jennyholzer

Twitter: class en masse
http://twitter.com/manyvoices

Twitter: republishing content
http://twitter.com/novelsin3lines

http://twitter.com/oscarwilde

Wikistorytelling
The Penguin novel
( http://www.amillionpenguins.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page )

Wikistorytelling Can a collective create a believable fictional voice? How does a plot find any sort of coherent trajectory when different people have a different idea about how a story should end – or even begin? And, perhaps most importantly, can writers really leave their egos at the door? “ About”, http://www.amillionpenguins.com/wiki/index.php/About

Flickr and storytelling
Tell a story in 5 frames group
“ The Chase” ( Benjamin! , 2009) http://flickr.com/groups/visualstory/discuss/72157611666013264/

Flickr and storytelling
In the Tell a story in 5 frames group, 'Alone With The Sand'
(moliere1331, 2005)

Social photo stories Example: « Farm to Food », Eli the Bearded (2008)

Social photo stories

Flickr, Tell A Story in Five Frames group ( http://www.flickr.com/groups/visualstory/ )
Example: "Food to Farm", Eli the Bearded (2008)

Social photo stories Example: "Food to Farm", Eli the Bearded (2008)

Pedagogies:
Remix
Archive work
Social presentation
Visual literacy
( http://www.flickr.com/groups/visualstory/discuss/72157603786255599/ ; http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/ )

Social slides
Barbara Ganley, “Into the Storm” (2007)
( http://www.slideshare.net/bgblogging/intothestorm http://bgexperiments.wordpress.com/2007/07/13/into-the-storm/ )

Embedded within Slideshare Web platform apparatus

Embedded within blog

Storytelling by p odcast
The Yellow Sheet , by Librivox team (2007)
Text then podcast
http://librivox.org/the-yellow-sheet-by-librivox-volunteers/
More: Podiobooks, http://www.podiobooks.com/

Web video storytelling
Connect with I ( http://www.connectwithi.com/ )
Serial video
Fan content
Physical content

lonelygirl15 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonelygirl15 )
YouTube serial video content
Local fan content
Distributed response
Hoax plot

Storytellerster
MySpace, Facebook as platform
Example: Silver Ladder
(Two of Clubs character on Myspace)

Multiplicity of platforms New forms combining categories into one?

Multiplicity of platforms
New forms combining categories into one?
Voicethread Storybox ( http://www.story-box.co.uk/index.php )

Multiplicity of platforms
New forms combining categories into one?
Jaycut, web-based video editing
Remember: video can be multimedia

Multiplicity of platforms http://wetellstories.co.uk/stories/week2/ Twitter feeds, blogs (different platforms), MySpace, maps “ Slice”, from We Tell Stories anthology, Penguin (2008)

How to experience a Web 2.0 story
A Web page in a browser
Easy or difficult to parse (Web design, also story style)
Effect of images (visual rhetoric)
“ about”
… consider this close reading
On mobile device (phone, e-reader, game player, mp3 player)

Breakdown:
Tags
Social media hooks
Comments
Links to other content

In RSS reader

Podcasts

So why Web 2.0 storytelling?
It’s a light but functional form of social gaming.
Eve Online, from site
Persistent world
Distributed players
Distributed knowledge
Very low cost
Some portability

Example: social Twitter storytelling: retelling The War of the Worlds
Described http://infocult.typepad.com/infocult/2008/08/alien-invasion-via-twitter.html

A certain loss of control
Social storytelling is user-generated content… which means some other user’s content next to yours. Which, like too much of a good thing, can be wonderful.
Exercise three: edit someone else’s wiki page. Pick the group after you in the alphabet.

Alternate reality games
Permeability of game boundary (space and time)
Focus on distributed, collaborative cognition
Increased ephemerality
So why Web 2.0 storytelling, again? (Perplex City, 2003-2006)

Political ARG
(World Without Oil, May 2007)

ARG pedagogy
Creation for constructivism
Information literacy
Object of study
(Nine Inch Nails game, 2007)

Practices and principles
Time
Wilkie Collins: "Make 'em cry, make 'em laugh, make 'em wait"
keep it coming (cf ask a Ninja)
Big time: serial
Little time: accretive

Easy to start
Web 2.0 is a brainstorming tool, a starting story service, a platform for quickly getting into the thing.
Writing prompt (and not necessarily text)
Use social media content, or not
Publish socially, or not

Character
You: persona
Creative or historical character
Blog as character (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)
Twitter as character (Eric Rice)

Setting
Maps, images, wiki, video, sounds
External link, embededed, or ambient

How to serialize
Introduction: station id
Recap
Where to cut? Complete bit, or mid-stream
Sequence: linear or other
Outro: hook; logistics

Chunking out lexia
Recap/summary of story
Cliffhanger
Internal organizing statement
Discrete argument point
Arranging the pieces
POV
Timeline
Embedded story
Meta, help, disclaimer
(And they move without you.)

The slide of no work
How does this stuff impact me, if I don’t make or help make anything?
Academic study
Growing body of stories
Influence on other areas: news, publishing, entertainment, infotainment
New platforms emerging

Futures
Stories about Web 2.0 storytelling
Ken Macleod, The Execution Channel (2008)
( http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/15-07/local ) -Bruce Sterling, Wired , 2007

Already used for humor
http://www.much-ado.net/austenbook/

Futures
Copyright
Web 2.0 accelerates opportunities for copyright practices, from fair use (quotes, snippets) to infringement (copying whole texts)
Emerging practices: snippet+link, Wikipedia notice
Other practices: using TEACH, Creative Commons

Futures
Mobile devices -> "interstitial fiction”?
“ it can be fiction or nonfiction, but it is unlikely to be a single isolated five-minute item, as it would be hard to market or to find such an item. More likely short items will be strung together in an anthology; the thesis of the anthology ("brief bursts about the new administration"; "101 short poems about transistors and current") will suffuse each item with a sense of being part of a whole.”
Joseph Esposito, http://toc.oreilly.com/2008/12/interstitial-publishing.html

The ultimate links
http://web2storytelling.wikispaces.com/
and
http://delicious.com/tag/web2storytelling

The ultimate links
Bryan Alexander and Alan Levine, "Web 2.0 Storytelling: Emergence of a New Genre“
EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 43, no. 6 (November/December 2008)
http://www.educause.edu/library/erm0865

The ultimate links
Liberal Education Tomorrow
http://blogs.nitle.org/let
Bryan on Twitter
http://twitter.com/BryanAlexander
NITLE
http://nitle.org

Web2 0storytelling 2009

by Bryan Alexander

Accessibility

Categories

Upload Details

Usage Rights

Statistics

Web2 0storytelling 2009 Presentation Transcript