This document discusses the concept of transmedia storytelling, which refers to stories that are told across multiple media platforms to create a richer entertainment experience for consumers. It requires consumers to actively search across channels to find all parts of the story and collaborate online to share their findings. The document also discusses how academic fields are changing with increased focus on interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches that integrate knowledge across fields to address complex issues. As political and economic forces shape universities, new forms of knowledge are emerging that involve multiple stakeholders both within and outside of academia.

1. Handout 3 King, Workshop Online: “Social Media Learning,” http://socmedlearn.blogspot.com/
Linköping University, Sweden, 29-30 March 2011
transmedia storytelling for transdisciplinary knowledges under academic restructuring
Katie King, Women's Studies, University of Maryland, College Park/Email: katking@umd.edu
Home Page: http://katiekin.weebly.com/ Twitter: @katkingumd; in Second Life: Katie Fenstalker
“Transmedia storytelling refers to a new aesthetic that has emerged in response to
media convergence – one that places new demands on consumers and depends on the
active participation of knowledge communities. Transmedia storytelling is the art of
world making. To fully experience any fictional world, consumers must assume the role
of hunters and gatherers, chasing down bits of the story across media channels,
comparing notes with each other via online discussion groups, and collaborating to
ensure that everyone who invests time and effort will come away with a richer
entertainment experience.” (Jenkins 2006: 20-1)
References:
• Gomez, J. (2008) “What is transmedia?” Starlight Runner Entertainment. Available online at:
http://starlightrunner.com/transmedia
• Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where old and new media collide. NYU.
• King, K. (2009). “You are not the author anymore.” Available online at: http://notauthor.blogspot.com/
• Klein, J. T. (2004). “Disciplinary origins and differences.” Fenner Conference on the Environment, Canberra, 24-25 May.
Available online at: http://www.science.org.au/events/fenner/klein.htm
• McGonigal, J. (2011) Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better. Penguin
• Quest to Learn [School in NYC] (2009) See website online at: http://q2l.org/
• Slaughter, S. and Leslie, L. L. (1997). Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University. Johns Hopkins.
• Traweek, S. (2000) “Faultlines.” In Doing Science + Culture, pp. 21-48. Routledge.
POLITICAL ECONOMY AND INTERESTING QUESTIONS (Traweek 2000: 23)
“I have become interested in how these massive shifts in political economy affect the kinds of questions intellectuals
begin to find interesting at such periods, the kinds of resources amassed to investigate their questions, the kinds of
curricular and pedagogical changes generated, and the new modes of investigation. That is, what else is going on
when there is a change in what counts as a good question, an interesting mode of inquiry, way of teaching and
learning, and the infrastructure needed for pursuing these emerging forms of knowledge making? Who resists these
changes; how do they resist?”
ACADEMIC CAPITALISM (Slaughter, Leslie 1997: 9, 12-3)
“By using academic capitalism as our central concept, we define the reality of the nascent environment of public
research universities, an environment full of contradictions, in which faculty and professional staff expend their human
capital stocks increasingly in competitive situations. In these situations, university employees are employed
simultaneously by the public sector and are increasingly autonomous from it. They are academics who act as
capitalists from within the public sector; they are state-subsidized entrepreneurs. // Movement toward academic
capitalism is far from uniform; indeed, it is characterized by unevenness. Even within the English-speaking countries,
there exists a continuum on this dimension, with Canadian academics probably least involved with the market and
U.S. academics probably most involved…. higher education in the United Kingdom and Australia has moved rapidly
toward the market, the United Kingdom in the mid 1980s, Australia in the late 1980s.”
TRANSMEDIA (Gomez, CEO Starlight Runner Entertainment 2008):
"Deep media, persistent narrative, immersive storytelling, transmedia: right now, we are experiencing a moment of
radical technological change, with seismic shifts in the way that entertainment is conceived, produced and
distributed.... Transmedia storytelling is storytelling by a number of decentralized authors who share and create
content for distribution across multiple forms of media. Transmedia immerses an audience in a story’s universe
through a number of dispersed entry points, providing a comprehensive and coordinated experience of a complex
story.... Transmedia narrative is the technique of conveying messages, concepts and themes to a mass audience
through systemic and concerted use of multiple media platforms. The implementation is designed to engage audience
members individually, validating their involvement and positively reinforcing personal participation in the narrative.
The result is intense loyalty, long-term engagement and a desire to share the experience."
MULTI-, INTER-, AND TRANS-DISCIPLINARY KNOWLEDGES; KNOWLEDGE WORLDS (Klein, 2004, online)
“Multidisciplinary approaches add more knowledge to the mix rather than single, separate perspectives. They
juxtapose different perspectives, although they speak as separate voices, so their alignment is encyclopaedic.
“…It differs, however, from interdisciplinary interaction, which involves a conscious integration that may take any
number of forms. Interdisciplinary approaches consciously integrate separate data, methods, tools, concepts,
perspectives, theories to create a holistic view or a common understanding of a complex issue, question or problem.

2. “Note, though, that the purpose often differs. 'Instrumental’, 'strategic', and 'pragmatic' forms of interdisciplinary
differ from 'critical' and 'reflexive' forms. One of the strong forces propelling interdisciplinarity these days, particularly
in national research funding, emerged in the 1970s and 1980s when industrialised nations found themselves falling
behind in international economic competition in areas of manufacturing, computers, biomedicine, and the medical
sciences. These initiatives focus on social, technological and economic problems. They differ from culture-based forms
of interdisciplinary investigation and environmental campaigns.
“The third term I wanted to put on the table is 'transdisciplinary'. All three terms date from 1970. The typology of
multi-, inter- and transdisciplinarity evolved from a conference in 1970 that the OECD had in France, the first
international conference on the problems of teaching and research in universities. At the time, transdisciplinarity was
defined as a kind of comprehensive framework that tries to go beyond combining existing disciplinary approaches in
an interdisciplinary fashion to create new frameworks, new overarching syntheses. General systems theory has been
one of the most important ones, along with policy sciences, feminism, ecology.
“More recently, particularly in Europe and Latin America, a new meaning of transdisciplinarity has emerged…going
beyond not only disciplinary boundaries but the boundaries of the academy with society and involving multiple
stakeholders. This meaning has been strongly clear in the evolution of environmental work.
“…The languages of describing knowledge have changed in kind. The older keywords of description for knowledge and
education were dominated by images of boundary formation and maintenance, expertise and mastery and control.
That process still goes on in 'disciplining' knowledge into segmented, fragmented, and even isolated fields that were
presumed to develop in a linear fashion with normative social values and homogeneity.
“Today, though, descriptions of disciplines, professions, and knowledge in general have changed. The current
keywords are boundary crossing and blurring, integration and collaboration and cooperation, and interdependence in
an environment characterised by complexity, nonlinearity and heterogeneity, and a trans-sectorality associated with
the term ‘transdisciplinarity.’
“Ultimately, our common project…is to create robust knowledge, knowledge that draws on traditional canons of rigour
and reliable knowledge but is also socially robust. I borrow the concept of robust knowledge from Nowotny, Scott and
Gibbons' work, Re-thinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty. Robustness is a relational
concept borrowed from engineering…. The challenge for us today is to create robust knowledge that factors not only
multiple disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledges but lay knowledges and indigenous knowledges in arriving at
sustainable solutions.”
POSTHUMANITIES AND GLOBAL ACADEMIC RESTRUCTURING (King 2009: http://notauthor.blogspot.com)
“• Having to address many diverging audiences simultaneously
• Having to author knowledges as merely one of multiple agencies with very limited control
In the nineties television had to learn not only to “show” but also to “tell,” in forms newly interactive and
participatory. It accomplished this in not altogether voluntary partnership with the web, and, beyond that, in activated
partnerships with assertive fans, un-black-boxing educators and intellectual entrepreneurs who took jobs of
“reception” seriously and practiced them in detail. It became necessary to both show and tell, in new divisions of
hyperlinking labor. Multiple products that expanded sensory ranges for commercial reasons were also tasked with
hyperlinking responsibilities in embedded and immersive layers among cascading infrastructures. Reenactments
became a particular way to both show and tell, reenactors a kind of communication technology themselves, scaled
both as persons, and also as moveable elements in immersive seas of actants now eddying among knowledge worlds.
Reenactment melodramas demonstrated transdisciplinary knowledge practices such as speaking with things as well as
the affects and ethics of sifting through and managing authoritative and alternative knowledges in a posthumanities.
The boundary work of pitting cultural criticism, or a set of “best” educator practices, in any simple way against the
liveliness of commercial exuberance, or the enjoyment of popular comforts and pleasures – as in refusing television or
enlisting in negative critique – became moot. Academic capitalism made only too explicit what was already historically
a complexly interwoven and multi-systemic layering of public infrastructures for education and entertainment.”
QUEST TO LEARN SCHOOL IN NYC, CREATED BY GAME DESIGNER KATIE SALEN & OTHERS
“Quest to Learn is a school for digital kids. It is a community where students learn to see the world as composed of
many different kinds of systems. It is a place to play, invent, grow, and explore.”
INTRINSIC REWARDS, NEUROBIOLOGY, GAME DESIGN (McGonigal 2011, kindle location 821)
“…from a neurological and physiological point of view, ‘intrinsic reward’ is really just another way of describing the
emotional payoffs we get by stimulating our internal happiness systems. By undertaking a difficult challenge…we an
produce in our bodies a rush of adrenaline, the excitement hormone that makes us feel confident, energetic, and
highly motivated. By accomplishing something that is very hard for us…our brains release a potent cocktail of
norepinephrine, epinephrine, and dopamine. These three neurochemicals in combination make us feel satisfied, proud,
and highly aroused. When we make someone else laugh or smile, our brain is floded with dopamine, the
neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and reward.”