A “Story Genome” Project

January 26, 2019 by Brian Hughes

random.genome — A visual representation of a human genome.

How do the stories we read, hear, or come to know make us who we are?

What if we could track and annotate how these stories constitute our identity and behavior? (Or perhaps rather our rational deliberations?)

If we had a map of that similar to the mapping of genomes, could that be a useful educational tool? Or a tool for better understanding others?

I think we’d want to know and highlight the biggest influences and to see “storied” context of why they are our biggest influences—why they are meaningful to us.

The resulting map would constitute a different “story genome” for each person. It would be a quantified self tool that would require constant updating and revising. I think we could learn a lot about ourselves and others.

What’s the future of Twitter?

May 2, 2015 by Brian Hughes

Twitter stock has recently suffered as a result of weak earnings (and related confidence), so I’ve been reflecting on the value I place in it versus Facebook.

Everyone’s surely different, but I figure one way for me to assess it is to evaluate the differences between the list of my Facebook friends and the accounts I follow on Twitter (I have to add my handle to my own list’s URL on Twitter, but of course with my “default” settings I can’t even share my Facebook list).

So what do I see? In my case, a rather subtle difference! Even before this comparison, I recognize that in my case I use these services in very similar ways—some close friends, some strangers—in short, a mixed social bag on both accounts. But by looking closely, the “game-ish” contours of Twitter start to emerge…

where word-smithing is more important… and fun (it’s such a chore on Facebook)
where I feel like I’m actively doling out social recognition by re-tweeting and favoriting (as opposed to the more personal Facebook “like”)
where I can easily search for new ideas (and break out of my filter bubble)
where I can blend my personal and professional interests (there just isn’t room for my professional self on Facebook
where my new ideas seems to matter more than my same old self

The indicators above seem like distinctly intellectual features that such a service could offer. In all other ways, Facebook and Twitter seem almost identical to me.

I recognize that this is a very particular case, and that there are many other ways to use these services. But, head-to-head, pound-for-pound, I also suspect that there is a deeper indication here that Twitter, even (or perhaps especially) when viewed as a redundant service, is of equal social value to Facebook in the emerging world.

Perhaps, even greater.

image credit: http://attending.io/events/free-lunchtime-intro-workshop-twitter-facebook-ads

Learning with Apple Live

March 9, 2015 by Brian Hughes

Apple’s live events keep evolving, and I would love to be able to use their “live broadcasting” toolkit—essentially turning their website into a media-rich live blog of the event. Here’s a screenshot of what today’s Apple Watch-focused event looked like:

The key features of this mode of presentation are:

Live video of the main presentation—which is being produced somewhere (usually California) for a live audience.
Produced video elements are used during the presentation. Split-screens are sometimes used to juxtapose the speaker and other content (as above).
Pre-made, widget-like cards appear from top to bottom with short summaries (including images and video) of the presentation content. They have simple, built-in social sharing functionality.
When you scroll down to see older cards, the video is shrunk to a thumbnail and continues to play at the top of the page.

These elements combine for a simple, compelling online presentation. One can easily step away and come back, and skim the cards to see what was missed. It would be equally great if the presentation could be replayed from the point of any ‘card’… though I don’t think this is currently the case!

So, if I had this presentation toolkit, would I use it? Given the amount of pre-planning and multimedia in use, it would certainly take a significant up-front investment (e.g., time, money, preparation). However, to deliver a high-impact event to a web audience, it seems like a great place to start.

I especially like the live element—which underscores the event with the sense that, “this would be even more impressive in person, but I’m as close as I can get!”

Will Educators Own the Future?

August 15, 2014 by Brian Hughes

Likely not.

I just finished reading Jaron Lanier’s ‘Who Owns the Future?‘—about a year after the rest of the world, it turns out—and I’m not optimistic.

It was an excellent read, especially due to Lanier’s broad experience with technologies and his interest in economics. He offers educators a lot to think about, such as:

Will teaching be a middle class job (at least) in the future?

Will humans even be paid to teach?

How will education be limited by software? And how will that software hide the contribution of humans?

These are some questions at the core of his ruminating, and the thesis of the book (that the world is generally headed in the wrong direction with respect to how networks are designed and used) opened up these questions in new ways for me.

I am afraid I am quite sympathetic to his worries. Unfortunately his bleak vision of the future isn’t well-balanced by his ideas for how to mitigate the present dangers of technology and create a better world for humans.

In general, I’d like to think I’m working on a solution just by working in the education sector. But Lanier gives me pause, and a lot to think about.

Flashcards for training

September 26, 2013 by Brian Hughes

Earlier this year we implemented a new staff-side training tool at the Gottesman Libraries: flashcards. That doesn’t sound progressive (it’s rote learning!), but we’re using a very cool tool developed by Teachers College alum Andrew Cohen: Brainscape.

Our library has a public knowledge base (FAQs), and a staff knowledge base that is more extensive, but with the variety of services we offer, it’s difficult to include nuances (even very important ones!) in these resources. So we use flashcards to extend and deepen staff knowledge of key services.

For example, the library hosts and supports the TC community blogging on Pressible, which is built on WordPress. There are a myriad of details that a library patron might want to know, especially if they are familiar with WordPress. Since our system includes many customizations, flashcards cover issues such as:

Q: “How do I get an image on my bio page?” A: Pressible uses Gravatar.com — a tool built and run by the company that supports WordPress. If someone has a Gravatar, Pressible will use it automatically.
Q: “Can anyone sign up as an author on Pressible?” A: No, only individuals with TC or CU emails can sign up. However, site administrators can manually add anyone (with any email) as an author using the “Add User” menu.
Q: “Why is there a big empty gray bar across the top of my site?” A: This is automatically filled with links to posts when authors use Categories (displayed as Topics).

Knowing the answers to these kinds of questions has helped staff better understand our tools (we’ve confirmed this via various anonymous surveys). Anything that makes staff more confident in correctly answering questions is very helpful—more responsive staff means a better (more accurate and speedier) experience for our learning community.

We’ve already developed dozens of flashcards on a variety of topics to date, and our experience with Brainscape has given us the confidence to continue to develop flashcards as key staff training tools.

Transmedia for Social Change

February 18, 2011 by Brian Hughes

Today I attended the final day of an intensive workshop event hosted by Working Films. The event brought together a diverse group of talented filmmakers, powerful activists, and leaders in the education sector – I was lucky I got to crash their party! In their own words, it was:

a residential workshop designed to help filmmakers and non-profit organizations leverage the power of films that document some of the most significant problems – and innovative local solutions – that unfold every day in schools across the United States and the world… [The last day] is a day of serious strategy for groups already committed to advancing change in the educational sector!

Cool stuff. At the center of the event were seven amazing films (links below). After hearing from the production teams and seeing clips from their films, we workshopped “social action” strategy in small groups.

Social Action

Action. Justice. Change. Transformation. Learning. There was a lot of passion in the films, and a lot of potential to start conversations, dialogue, etc. So that’s where we started. It was a lot to take in: the filmmakers (and by extension the production companies) shared their visions of the kind of impact they wanted their films to have. Better educational opportunities? Yes. Empowerment for underserved groups? Yes. Social change? You bet. Some of their ideas overlapped, some diverged.

A theme from the ongoing discussion that stood out to me was what someone in the group referred to as a “transmedia strategy” – from the idea of transmedia storytelling across multiple platforms and formats (Kinder 1991, Jenkins 2003). The conversation that emerged throughout the day was how the filmmakers – if they wanted to enhance the transformative potential of their films – were likely going to leave the more familiar domain of film… and enter into meatspace and cyberspace in new ways.

Or, in other words, the essential question of the day was: How can films lead to action?

I think everyone was sympathetic to the idea that discussion isn’t enough – that talk is cheap, as they say, even with respect to democratic action. And there was a shared sense among the activists and the educators that the films could do even more.

Notes on Transmedia Strategy

So this was my schtick about trying to get things done online: Start by creating opportunities for “engagement” across a spectrum of actions ranging from simple to complex. (Twitter = simple. Facebook = pretty simple. Embedding video = getting harder. Coming to your site = not so simple. Using your tools = takes some dedication. Putting content on your site = hard.) The Internet may be somewhat indifferent to your ideology (so to speak), but it is definitely not indifferent to the design of your software/applications/etc. A strategy that includes many of these elements – and successfully engages your audience – is a sufficient transmedia strategy.

Across the seven projects (“projects” seems better than “films” in this context), there was already a variety of thinking about online and social action strategy. Interestingly, I sometimes couldn’t tell if an idea for an “app” or a website was a tie-in or a tool – and it occurs to me now that that’s probably a bad sign. Allow for a quick clarification of terms: for me, a tie-in is a filmworld thing (to bring people to the experience of the film), and a tool is an educational thing (that empowers people to change things). The two can go hand-in-hand – and I nodded my head positively as we talked about that – but it is an uneasy relationship.

I suspect it would pay off to disentangle a tool from other tie-ins. They’re different animals. A good example of this kind of distance is the “professional development experience for teachers.” That’s something that someone else builds, and inserts some excerpts from your film into. It’s not a tie-in as much as a tool. And: let someone else make that tool.

But, let’s say you want to build a tool for social change, and you want to do it yourself.

You want to build a way to help parents connect. A way to give young learners a voice. A way to make families without children care about education. A way to help people achieve a new literacy. (Let’s agree to ignore the teachers here on the premise that they got the professional development kit.) You’ve now taken off your filmmakers’ hat off and put on a crazy new hat. You’re building a new tool.

First of all, you still need the aforementioned transmedia strategy: that’s your so-called social media funneling people of all kinds toward your film experience. A tool isn’t that. And, perhaps sadly, it’s not your film either – that helps, but it’s a non-starter in an online/digital/phone/app space. It’s also not your festival-in-a-box (that’s a tie-in). If you want a great tool, don’t confuse amplification with transformation. Amplification is about getting the word out and the conversation started. Transformation is when you enable every person to make it their own.

Sidenote: let’s agree not to aim to change policy on day one. Not with the tool that you’re going to put online (or on a mobile device). Let’s be realistic here: it would be a huge win if your chosen constituency finds your tool as useful as a scrap of paper. You’ll have to build up from there.

So, secondly, and most importantly, you need to make a useful tool. A humble, easy-to-understand tool. One with a little inspiration and imagination. It’s just one part of your transmedia strategy. It’s the part that aims at a very specific group of people and allows them to engage or enact the ideas that are buried deep within your film. It’s a super simple thing that may spring into the world wholly-formed, or take shape through many stages of refinement and revision. Sure, it’s a tie-in, but it shouldn’t look like one. It has to be a gift.

So let’s get to the unpleasantries. Unpleasantry #1: If you want your film to be part of a tool, you have to give your media away for free. Yep: that’s how the Internet wants it. That’s how educators want it. That’s how students want it. You don’t have to give it all away. And this isn’t just a strategy to get people to come and pay for another experience. This is a reality. It’s a reality for films that are good, authentic, truthful, honest, and transformative. If that means your film, that’s probably a good thing. Get over it. Keep your day job. Etc.

Unpleasantry #2: Developing good tools is hard. It’s easy to throw a lot of money at the problem and lose. But that doesn’t mean it’s expensive. You just need new friends. These new friends will be young, opinionated, difficult to communicate with, and just generally strange by your standards. (That’s okay though, right? You’re a filmmaker for goodness’ sake.) The words they should be saying to you are: simple, iterative, open source. That’s not a recipe; it’s just a good foundation. If they’re not saying those things, good luck to you. I have no idea what you’re building.

Unpleasantry #3: You need data. You need to convince your new aforementioned friend(s) that you need data. Each and every new aforementioned friend will not like the idea of gathering data, but with a little push, he or she can create a nice foundation. Traffic? Sure. An understanding of how individuals use your tool? Excellent. Demographic data? That would be nice. It’s unclear what you’ll do with it now, but it’s for the future. It’s for growing. It’s for understanding what you’re actually doing. Collect it. Organize it. Save it. If your tool is successful, it’s going to help you tell your story. Data is the cinematography of the digital world. (Hypothesis for further exploration: collecting great data is the high art of social change.)

Bonus round: give your users control over their content and their data. This will ingratiate you to the geeks and the media literate, but it’s also a great practice that will help you build a community around your tool. Give them an easy way to give you feedback, too.

Lastly, importantly,

I hope this vaguely coherent rant is more clarifying than it is discouraging. There is a ton of room in this world for transmedia for social change. We’re giving up too much if we leave it all up to Facebook, Google, and Apple. Jump in and play a bit. Hey, you’ve made a film… do you really want to do that again anytime soon?

Also, don’t forget about the people in your films. They are the people who have been given the most powerful tool of all.

Lastly, a big thanks to the multitalented organizers of the workshop, and, of course, anyone who had to suffer through an encounter with me, lol.

The films:

Changing Teaching with Learning.com

July 21, 2010 by Brian Hughes

“You are innovators” is the message to the teachers at Learning.com‘s second annual professional development workshop in Portland, Oregon. I’m attending the workshop to learn more about their really interesting new software, Sky. I’m also interested to learn if their message to teachers is accurate, a wishful prediction, a hyperbolic marketing strategy, or something else. Working alongside teachers who are learning to use Sky, I begin to hope, will lead me to an answer.

Sky is the name of Learning.com’s recently-launched digital learning environment – which means, among other things, that it’s a platform for teachers and students to access instructional modules (what used to be called curriculum). Using Sky, teachers can create and assign modules (games, animations, links to online resources) to individual students, groups, or a whole class. Each student can go at their own pace or skip around, leaving a trail of data about their learning experiences.

Seeing a group of 50 teachers, librarians, administrators, and other educators learning to use this tool brought to mind a salient issue looming over the education sector: the transformation of the work of teaching from a classroom-based activity to a community-based activity. By this I mean to suggest that the horizon of a teacher’s work is expanding in two senses – both spatially (i.e., a teacher can interact with people in a distant location in a way that is perhaps easier than stepping out of the classroom and walking down the hallway to speak to a colleague) and socially (i.e., a teacher expected to interact with more people than ever).

To anyone who’s interested in education these days, this is not exactly new news. But watching teachers learn to use Sky, a metaphor floated into mind: teachers are being asked to abandon their role as performers. Software like Sky demands that teachers become increasingly like DJs. In short,

Teachers are being asked to jockey media (of all kinds) in the way that DJs jockey music.

Consider this description of a “Club DJ”:

Club DJs are very well versed in mixing music to motivate the club goers to dance and drink. Very successful Club DJs can amass real fan followings. Club DJs have historically been on the leading edge innovation when it comes to leveraging the equipment they have for the best new sounds and memorable effects.

Putting aside the goal of dancing and drinking for the moment, the part of this description that strikes me as apt is the effect DJs have on their audience: they are recognized for leveraging the equipment they have for the best new sounds and memorable effects. As companies like Learning.com put innovative software into teachers’ hands, and when these tools further extend the reach of teachers to more and more content (note: I am using “content” and “media” interchangeably, where media puts the emphasis on the diversity of available content), it seems that their role as purveyors of knowledge – and, therefore, as critics and curators of media – is made more pronounced.

Great teaching has, of course, always been about being knowledgeable about, and delivering, content (with bonus points for delivering the right content at the right time). But a significant change that software can make possible is the amount of media that a teacher has access to, and therefore, has the possibility of being knowledgeable about. And this goes beyond mere facts and static content – even beyond dynamic content, methodology, and analysis – and into the area of the learning tools that students can use in conjunction with that content and those processes.

So what are some of the new tricks that Teacher-DJs will have to learn, refine, and become known for? The following come to mind:

delivering simple, efficient, and multi-modal learning activities to students
directing students to great, fresh, and relevant resources
providing a directed (but not inauthentic) way to experience the Internet
sharing responsiblity for student work (and related actions) on school-suported publishing platforms

A related way these changes will likely play out is that authorship will increasingly become an important aspect of teaching. Whether a teacher is authoring content for students, describing and/or reviewing content for fellow teachers, or describing and/or reviewing content for a wider audience (including parents, administrators, and communities), the immediacy (and sheer reach) of the Internet will amplify the importance and potential of this work.

For example, Learning.com has ventured into the realm of positioning teachers within a network powered by sophisticated social software. Using Sky, teachers can create and share lesson plans – lesson plans they may have always had, but perhaps never before in a form that was so ready for sharing so widely. Software features that support searching for, selecting, and rating others’ lesson plans raise the significance of formerly merely digital tools (e.g., putting lesson plans online) to a new level.

An interesting effect of this kind of social software will be that there may be (will be?) increasingly more social pressure on teachers to create and share their work with other teachers. So teachers will be authors not only in the sense that students will use their multimedia assemblages (which seems like a good way to describe their products in software like Sky), but in the sense that other teachers will be able to access their work. By sharing work in this way, and as a community of teachers becomes interested in the depth and quality of a fellow teacher’s work, each teacher may subsequently be judged by it. And though this may have been the case previously on a more local level (e.g., interactions between a teacher and his/her department or administrators), social software is fundamentally changing the professional landscape of teaching by transforming social interactions between teachers.

Understood in this way, it seems that social software is becoming intertwined in what some consider the history of the de-professionalization of teaching. Though, as we see in the comparison to the work of DJs, it is also creating new possibilities of professionalism through a kind of grassroots process – where the day to day work of teachers (lesson-planning) becomes a new kind of lingua franca in valuing a teacher’s abilities and achievements. This is promising stuff. But where there can be little doubt that software like Sky will change teaching, how long it will take for the policies and realities that regulate the day to day activities of students under the watch of lumbering bureaucracies is less clear. And so,

It is still unclear if social software can be a vehicle that gives teachers more power to directly transform the education sector.

Looking into the heart of software like Sky, one sees how teachers are being asked to change the way they work in both obvious and subtle ways. Making a comparison to the work of DJs is, after all, probably not fair. But I think it’s a helpful metaphor. DJs take a lot of pride in their work, and are recognized for their unique contributions to spaces, events, and communities. Rather than evaluating a cultural shift in teaching as a good or bad thing, this kind of lens helps me better understand the kind of work teachers are being asked to do.

Are teachers innovators? Software like Sky gives them an opportunity to innovate. Not all will, but those who do will participate in an interesting transformation – and potentially a watershed period – in the history of the education sector.