Flotsam: A Transmedia Play Experience

I'm working at the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab, in partnership with The Alchemists, to extend the principles of transmedia storytelling into the exciting realm of children’s entertainment and education by exploring the transmedia storytelling opportunities presented by Flotsam - a visual representation that encourages all to discover the fantastical story of the oceans and our relationship to it.

David signing a Flotsam book.

Flotsam was created by the award-winning author David Wiesner and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.  In December, we conducted a two-day Think & Do Tank to discuss the potential of leveraging new media affordances for children’s storytelling, learn from the diversity of knowledge and experience that our attendees (including some of our sponsors such as Orange France-Telecom and Warner Brothers) brought with them, and play with ideas and each other in the sandbox (literal and figurative!).

You might be wondering what a Think & Do Tank is?  Over the past two years, I've designed and refined a Think & Do Process at the lab to foster an open space for people of varied disciplines and backgrounds to come together and effectively learn from each other and create together. The Think & Do Process often occurs over multiple sessions with the goal of creating real tangible products / productions. As Albert Einstein famously said, "Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them." This is not a single or solitary occupation but a collective, an embracing and transforming process of engagement where transparency across disciplines has us “see with new eyes;” to push ourselves and each other to be constant learners, to grow and innovate to better ourselves and the world we live in.

Collective Storytelling of Flotsam

A Think & Do process often is held for, at minimum, a full‐day immersive experience with the potential of extending into one or two additional days. The primary goal of a Think & Do session is to implore the idea of thinking while tinkering, or thinkering. Thinkering, coined by Michael Ondaatje in his novel The English Patient, means to think about something by tinkering with objects relating to the problem under consideration. It usually is unguided, exploratory and collaborative, and often used to explore aspects of difficult problems or to find solutions where none are obvious.  In other words, an active form of thinking. This has become an ideal means to describe a designer’s way of doing things.

Participants come from varied disciplines and backgrounds, are asked to come and be mentally present throughout the entire session, respecting the goal of the day and the resources allotted within the time frame. This also holds true with the group / company involved in the process that has a stake in the final deliverables. This open line of communication before, during and after the Think & Do session helps make the entire process stronger and relevant to everyone’s expectations. Through this process perspectives are synthesized from those who are participating in the creative process and key takeaways with possibilities for incubation of new research‐design projects are identified.

Ideating Opportunities with Transmedia

With Flotsam's Think & Do Tank, there were three big ideas that emerged for which we are now in the process of designing and developing prototypes and which will be shared at the upcoming USC Annenberg Innovation Summit. The “mother narrative” of the Flotsam Transmedia Play Experience will be six story chapters delivered in the form of DIY “explorer kits” that encourage creative remix through the use of a camera that will come as part of the initial kit. These six chapters will extend the digitally dynamic book that we will design for participatory retelling of Flotsam; user generated retelling can be shared as gifts with family members and peers, as well as shared into the Flotsam community though a recursive photo application we are also designing that will connect Flotsam stories and creations to be released and shared.

We will share the conceptual design of the Flotsam Transmedia Play Experience at the upcoming Innovation Summit on March 30th and then continue incubation with focus groups in late April.  So more to come!  I hope in future posts I'll be able to share some of my ideas on how we define Transmedia play, learning and performance.

Our Space: Being a Responsible Citizen of the Digital World

We recently released the digital media and ethics casebook, Our Space: Being a Responsible Citizen of the Digital World that Project New Media Literacies developed in collaboration with Howard Gardner and Carrie James' GoodPlay Project. 

We see this casebook being used in homeroom, advisory periods or health classes.  However, our main concern regarding teaching ethics is one that we have seen occur in the media literacy movement.  Throughout the years, teaching media literacy was always relegated to an elective or at the end of class …if there was time.  People have begun to listen to the need to integrate media literacy across curricula and not consider it an aside or add on subject. Our Space is a set of resources that are just as important in today’s media-rich world we all live in, and should not be put aside to “when there is time” during the school day.  Beyond using these resources in the classes mentioned above, we have tried to include lessons that can work within subject-matter classes as well, such as Being Anonymous for a social studies or history class or Identity Play in Online Spaces for an English language arts classroom.

Regarding the casebook release, Anne Collier recently asked, "If a high school student asked you, "What's so important about learning ethics – why develop a whole curriculum around it like this?", what would you say?"

My response...

Imagine a flipping coin in mid-air, hanging there in limbo before landing on one of its two sides.  There is no right or wrong to the sides of a coin.  They both exist together and as the coin hangs in mid-air, it has the potential of landing on either side …At some point in your life, you will be like that coin hanging in mid-air where you’ve run into some issue that bothers you and you need to know your options and make a decision and land. 

Our Space helps to give you the full picture, the promises and the pitfalls of different situations that could or maybe already have happened to you or your friends.  We did this to not leave you with all the answers but hopefully provide you with the tools to form your own personal compass in knowing what questions to ask and how to find the right answers for you.

So please enjoy and help to spread the word about the free resource for all to use.  Thanks!

NML and PLAY!

** This is a re-post from NML's blog on Sept 27, 2011 by Vanessa Vartabedian, PLAY! Coordinator of Project New Media Literacies **

 Project NML has been involved in some exciting new endeavors since our move to the University of Southern California last year. As a part of USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, the new media literacy play (the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving) has become central to our current work in the field of digital media and learning. After partnering with the non-profit RFK Legacy in Action (RFK-LA) last fall, we began piloting a series of programs at the new Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools in Los Angeles under the umbrella of PLAY!, which in addition to being an nml, is also an acronym for 'participatory learning and you'!

NML’s guiding principal for a participant-centric approach to learning maintains providing ample opportunities for gaining expertise in the new media literacy skills and competencies. However, since branching out from working with individual educators and schools into the larger realm of professional development (starting with our early adopters program with the NH Dept. of Education in 2009), we've recognized the value of giving teachers permission to play the role of “participant-learner” (as opposed to "expert") before asking them to try new approaches with their students. By examining the ways educators took-up this challenge, our team was able to identify five characteristics of participatory learning that have come to frame our current research for PLAY!. Please take a moment to click on the link above to read more about them.

To get a sense of the direction we are taking with our current work on the ground, I will outline the programs we are piloting with the Los Angeles Unified School District below, which explore participatory learning practices, new models of professional development and the Playground tool.
PLAY! Projects
Our pilot PLAY! project, Explore Locally, Excel Digitally (ELED), was an after-school program for students that deeply explored themes around identity and community. Utilizing practices around mapping and other visualization tools, lessons culminated in digital representations of students’ perceptions on these themes. Since we know learning extends beyond the walls of classrooms and after-school programs to home, community and world – the program aimed to provide experiences that held a holistic view of the learner, and allowed for students to be full agents in their learning.
This past summer we ran a professional development called The Summer Sandbox. During these two week-long sessions, students from the ELED program modeled what they had learned for teachers and joined them as co-learners throughout the week. During these sessions we introduced a prototype for our new online collaborative learning tool, called the Playground. 
The Playground is an open-content, open-knowledge online system that encourages both adults and youth alike to discover, learn and teach each other. You will be able to use this transmedia platform to develop and take online "challenges", much like the Learning Library, only with improved capability for assessment, reflection, and a higher level participation. We are currently testing it with local educators and students and will announce when it is ready for a larger audience next spring.
As of now, we are in phase two of the PLAY! PD called Playing Outside the Box, where teachers will implement what they started during the Summer Sandbox and design a plan for sustainability. Students from RFK Community Schools will continue working with teachers in after-school settings for a series of workshops developed by our partnering organizations here in LA.
As you can see, we've been a bit busy but we're having fun because I work with an amazing team! Please take a few moments to visit our PLAY! wiki for more detailed information about these projects, and access new curriculum and resources.

USC Annenberg Innovation Lab Overview 2011

I've been busy this school year helping to launch the Annenberg Innovation Lab as Creative Director. Check out what this lab is all about!

USC Annenberg Innovation Lab Overview 2011

View more presentations from Erin Reilly.

2011 Horizon Report is out!

http://www.educause.edu/Resources/2011HorizonReport/223122

Each year, the Horizon Report describes six areas of emerging technology that will have significant impact on higher education and creative expression over the next one to five years. The areas of emerging technology cited for 2011 are:

Time to adoption: One Year or Less

• Electronic Books
• Mobiles

Time to adoption: Two to Three Years

• Augmented Reality
• Game-based Learning

Time to adoption: Four to Five Years

• Gesture-based Computing
• Learning Analytics

My current projects I'm involved in focus on future of eBooks, mobile learning afterschool program, and transparent learning analytics within a new platform being developed with Microsoft! How awesome is that! Stay tuned...

CRUNCH on THIS: Future of Journalism

I recently attended CRUNCH on THIS: Future of Journalism event held on January 14th. The purpose of this event was to identify new media tools and strategies that are available to journalists, and to determine how these tools can be applied in practical but innovative ways. Gabriel Kahn, Roberto Suro and Dana Chinn posed three challenges to the participants. I thought I'd share them with you here as they warrant additional exploration and discussion.

Three Challenges

1. Curation (Gabriel Kahn)

In the past, the newspaper was the sole determiner and responsible to curate and edit the news we consume. With the advent of self-organizing aggregation type tools, such as Google and Yahoo news, the need for additional ways to curate information has increased. Wikipedia and Twitter have become easily recognizable groups as sources for news. Additional sites, such as Digg, Instapaper, Flipboard, Pearltrees, Storify, theatlanticwire, and BBCmobile show that the public seeks immediate, inclusive warehouses of information that they can access, tag, and store for their own uses. Many of these platforms encourage the community to not only rate what news is credible but to be make connections across different news topics. The major question facing the Innovation Lab is how to manage the amount of information available so that it is easily consumable.

2. Data Mining (Roberto Suro)

The question posed is: How can we organize, compress and analyze information quickly? IBM has created an extensive data mining platform and partnered with the Innovation Lab to develop projects to explore how to 1) capture data, 2) filter, analyze and categorize it, and 3) create a dictionary of data that can be used in exploring visualizations, a visual narrative that helps us make sense of large quantities of data and new ways to identify patterns and emerging trends. The information is filtered from spreadsheets called Big Tables that link all references and cache the information to build a visual narrative. Many of the data sets are aggregated from sites that foster audience participation like Twitter and Wikipedia.

The challenge here is to identify, as an audience, what we need to know, what new ways we can tell our stories, and how our audience will feel about the stories we are to tell (see www.wefeelfine.org, www.nesmap.jp, and www.informationisbeautiful.net for examples of data that has been captured through visualizations).

3. How to Connect with Your Audience (Dana Chinn)

The rules of social media require 1) listening, 2) engaging, and 3) measuring your audience’s engagement, loyalty, influence, and action. For example, let us assume that you run a member-based organization that has set a goal of increasing membership among 20-30 year olds by 10 % within 12 months. Through Facebook and Twitter, the organization can map the metrics of increased youth membership and receive immediate feedback on any issue associated with membership among this group. Other resources to analyze authentic participation include www.KLOUT.com and www.newsnumbers.com.

The challenge here is to identify what actions indicate audience engagement. Do the daily stats from Facebook or Twitter really measure what we want to know? Numbers can be deceiving if you do not know what to look for or how to assess the right metrics. Suppose we want to know how engaged our members are in our print and digital publications. It is not enough to identify the number of hits on the NewsBlog, Facebook and Twitter; we need to examine the daily stats in terms of a) number of users, 2) the number of likes noted by the users, and 3) the number of comments presented by the users and the division of those comments into separate categories. To check on if numbers are telling the correct story, questions to consider include:

• Are the comments mostly from the same person?
• Do they focus on one or two topics only?
• How can we really know the influencers of our publications without harvesting and filtering the most usable information so that we can use it as a tool for strategic planning?

How does this information relate to you?

These are a few examples of ways to reach the widest possible audience using tools that will gather, categorize, and validate information. Social media tools, beyond Facebook and Twitter, are readily available for us to mine data about our audience and apply it in ways that further your goals and viable applications for researching the needs of your members to help build community. Check them out and learn how to apply them for mining data and presenting yourself or your organization in ways that will stimulate audience engagement.

Seminar in Media & Design Studies 11/11/10 Notes

Hayles, N. Katherine. Writing Machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002 (Laila)
Written in 2002... it's a book project
Talks about the materiality of language ...so the way the book is printed is impt to it. It has rough cover, glossy sheets
experiment of the book... Kate came up with a persona in order to do an autobiography ...serves the role that the autobiography would play. It's an intellectual autobiography. Felt confined in the chemistry lab ...all these hours and rules, wanted to find out the meaning. Went back to a degree in literature ...she's housed as a literary critic. Stories / vignettes of learning the politics of a place, in a department. Think there are rules in place to prevent issues, however there's always a culture, depends on the people in the department
Using eco-tomes ...the place where we have to get along (fissures, trying to work together)

Read her post-human book in the past
Thought I'd like My Mother is a Computer but liked WRiting Machines alot more, b/c the way its written.
Story of Kay... she's an academic. We find out that Aserteth (student) ...have advised that impt text in the field. She is very interdisciplinary. She looks at 3 texts, framed through the narrative voice of Kay. All hypertext literatures...
1) Lexia to perplexia
2) Humorant
3) House of Leaves

Kay Hills to humanities as Bruno Latour is to social science. Kay's moment is to find that which is simulated or signified as a pre-reference (Post-bart, post-seceur). Words are pre-material and we need to think about
We have a signified and something that we are signifying ...beyond deconstructing that, we need to think of text as being simulated from nothing.
Her mistake was concentrating on the navigation to see the words, instead of the work embedded the narrative in a topical environment. The word was interwoven with the world... layered images, simulated documents. Focus on the words along, she missed the point of the piece. An integrated piece of all components became signifying practices.
** By making text the only domain of signification, before you read it, the form already signifies what meaning is possible ** ...it's about the materiality of the way the text comes to us and the signifying influence of the form itself. (this is in the next book)

It's not just the construction of matter, but the matter of construction to human beings. How else do we find meaning, its not always through the word.

The word
The text
The document

What is the semiotic and performative discourse to the text. Expand textuality beyond the printed page.
Kay addresses the theory in this way... the theorists are interwoven in the fictional narrative of this woman Kay and how she learns about academia.

She pulls out in this autobiography:
* the importance of medium specificity analysis (think about Jenkins 7 principles of transmedia)

Three key pieces / conditions / things to look at when looking at electronic texts:

1. Materiality of language itself = It is authored ...author what "book-ness" is. This is what gets authored over and over again. [Whether it is designing your own application or taking one that exists ie: twitter and enacting, using it in new ways]
   
2. Recursivity language of techno-texts [the role of practice in text-making], This is about practicing theory. Your moving between things, the feedback loop to make better meaning. The relationship between theory and practice, not in one place or the other.
   
3. The need of looking at a medium specificity analysis = know the affordances of the text
   

Interesting conversation on the text ...is the database a text?

Book is designed by Anne Burdick ...a book that is a collaboration between a designer and a writer

Hayles, N. Kathering. My Mother Was a Computer (Laila)
Written in 2005
Computational perspectives and more traditional perspectives ... a way to synergize a theory that respects both.
Technogies of Engendered Bodies talk about it. Woman who did computational work use to be called computers.
Brings together the computational with the natural.
Bring the 2 worlds together in conversations.
Talks about mothers reading their children stories and when we grow up they are replaced by other stimuli

The Making of the Discreet - intermediation and relates to technologies driving the regime of computation. Code is the language system of speech and writing.
Intermediation -- co-evolution, electronic literature is exploring human and non-human, that we are in relationship with technologies... make meaning, age of computing might make this more predominant or more evident.
ie: what kind of subject am i musing in front of the installation. (standing at the presence of a student that has gone beyond you. A child that does something that surprises us.)
Distributed cognition ...jointly articulated activities. i think therefore i connect... human and non-human ...processes that you de-code or ones that you don't even have to de-code.

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Laila shares her poetry.

Node Job

it's been a long time, it's been a really long time

since the site of you watermarked on my chest and

fragments of touch embedded in the nodes of my body.

the culture of movement needs lubricant from a whisper of our love

it's been a long time, a really long time

since i extended into you.

she screamed rape at a glance,

and felt whipped by my tongue

remains just like before

when today followed yesterday and tomorrow was fantasy

i leave the scent on my fingers to linger

like a reminder of the experience

made me

and we are the summation of our experiences;

and the people we've touched

leave imprints of their scent on our skin

forever

mediated by cultural logic

and the basic text just extends

into worlds like silly putty

unreal in my fingertips

i kneed your breath

into my imagination of you.

-Laila Shereen Sakr

Los Angeles, 11/09/10

Use poetry to respond to theory. how can you use a poetic performance as my methodology.
Diego - a way to analyze.. take sexual words to make theoretical argument

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Alan Sokol ...Sokol Hoax
...point that the poeople of post-modernism theory didn't know what they were talking about. Don't adopt metaphors that you don't understand... especially when coming from another discipline. We've been burned by not understanding... then neither discipline is served.
...what are those non-scientists doing.

Ralph Abraham (father of fractal theory)

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Reflexive Practices as Transformative Research

1. Self-reflexive practice
1. Personal interest (cross-generational digital media & learning)
2. Creative insight (cyphibian theory, hybrid models ...video, images, audio not as an observer but as a participant itself)
3. Discipline knowledge (constructivism [Piaget], social constructivism [Vygotsky], constructionism [Papert], participatory culture [Jenkins])
2. Reflect on information gathered or conceptual strategies
3. Dialogue ..what is its significant meaning
4. Question content and context