Author: Chris Thomson

Dissertation 2.0

The last few months have been quite a challenge for a number of personal reasons so I’ve ended up taking an unintentional break from the dissertation. A few things have happened in the interim:

I’ve changed the topic of my dissertation

The first idea was too overwhelming and I think that was part of the reason for not properly engaging with it. I had a great discussion with Guy, several months ago now, where he suggested an alternative based around a case study of a single JISC-funded project. I was much happier with this and it held up the prospect of working closely with some excellent people around Sheffield and just seemed so much more manageable. It was at that point that I found myself slipping under a whole number of work projects so ended up having a hiatus. 

The new topic

…which has yet to be confirmed with Guy but he seemed happy with the broad summary I put to him pending a proper proposal. The new idea (hopefully the final one) is to focus on the development of JISC Netskills staff in order to support organisations with their storytelling. Once Guy’s fed back on the proposal I’ll explain it in more depth. It’s a lot closer to home and I think will have much greater benefit to me and the Netskills team.

Interest in the team

There are about half a dozen people at Netskills now keen to learn more about storytelling for a range of purposes. They want to engage at different levels, some wanting to create stories, others to support people they work with outside Netskills and some with a passing interest. 

There’s a good opportunity to document the process of informal collaborative learning that leads to becoming a storytelling organisation. This means I can look more closely at the ideas on affinity spaces, communituies of practice and situational learning that have interested me so much since I started TELIC.

A new publishing platform

Inspired by the examples of Ian Guest and Frank Thuss I’m making this dissertation available online. I’ll be using the WordPress platform for a number of reasons

  • I’m familiar with its basic operation
  • There is tonnes of flexibility in terms of how I can make the site look and function
  • It means Guy and anyone else can see work in progress and interact through comments and so on as the site develops
  • I can keep certain areas of the site private to protect the confidentiality of my research participants
  • There are people with WP skills at Netskills that I can call on and it will be a useful learning experience for me. WP is becoming more and more popular as a content management tool, not just a blog.
  • I can transfer my existing Posterous content easily
  • I don’t have to decide on a format straight away. I can remain flexible right up until submission day.

The plan will be to host it myself eventually, buying a domain name so I have more control over its availability and hopefully keeping it online for longer.

For the moment I’m building the basic structure and writing the content at this wordpress.com site. There’s very little there at the moment, just a room full of empty, jumbled boxes but it’s a start and I feel like I’ve got my momentum back.

Cheese Sandwich – Becoming a better storyteller

I’ve just completed 4 days worth of training on digital storytelling with a handful of colleagues that was run by Alex Henry of Curiosity Creative, formerly of Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums. This is just a brief report written immediately after the event so my thoughts on it aren’t fully formed.

Andy Stewart and I had met Alex at September’s Culture Shock conference and had been planning for a while how we could work together. This was the culmination of all that.

It was a great experience. We were mostly approaching it from the point of view of supporting projects to create digital stories (but not exclusively). Even though I’ve done a fair bit of work around DS in the past this was the first opportunity to really sit down and experience it as an extended facilitated session.

The method Alex was following was based on the one devised by the Centre for Digital Storytelling in the States by Joe Lambert. The aim was to produce a finished digital story but the process of getting to that point was the most interesting bit. I’ve included materials on my own story as a way of illustrating what we did.

Day 1 was about getting comfortable with telling stories to each other and finding ways of bringing stories out of other people. We tried activies like using objects and single pictures to inspire stories, free writing (writing non-stop, even when you’ve got nothing to write about) and sharing these stories with the rest of teh group. The story I eventually produced started off as a free writing exercise.

Then we used Audacity to create a raw, unedited audio file that would form the basis of the final product.

These 2 days were for me the highlight. There was compartively little digital activity which meant we focussed on the creation of the story and seeing storytelling as a social act in a way I hadn’t realised before. A particular discovery for me was realising how important it is to keep the language simple and as authentic as possible. Putting on affectations and purple prose makes the story less engaging (and makes me sound more of a pillock than usual!).

As a group we had discovered quite a lot about each other by the end, very useful as the basis for working together more in the future.

Day 3 took place 3 weeks after the previous day. we used the time between to gather together or creating the images we were going to use which, as ever, I left to the last minute but did mean I spent a large amount of time in the attic with our photo collection, rediscovering lost memories.

The morning of day 3 was devoted to editing the audio we had recorded before the break, mostly a neatening exercise.

The afternoon was probably the most frustrating part of the process. The aim was to have created a rough cut with the sound file and the images all ordered but with no editing or effects. Having felt a certain amount of freedom during the first couple of days I was now trapped by the constraints of iMovie and it all stopped being a social process. We all noted how quite we had become as a group as we got on with constructing our timelines. A few technical glitches meant I left feeling overwhelmed and that I wasn’t adding anything to my story, just over complicating it.

Day 4 – Feeling ill didn’t help with my motivation initially and I was expecting more of the feelings of yesterday afternoon but in the end it worked out OK. My main concern was that the images I had chosen just weren’t right. I was trying to strike a balance between not so literal that the images HAD to be what I was talking about or too abstract. Slowly, though it began to take on more of a shape and despite a few hiccups iMovie seemed to get out of the way more so I could just get on with making the story. 

Adding titles, transitions and effects to the images was a fiddle and I was glad I’d done stuff like this in the past or I’d have been tearing my hair out.

I replaced some of the images that weren’t working and it seemed to make more sense. I debated whether or not to add sound effects to certain bits, worried that it might get distracting – I’m still unconvinced by one of them but the sound over the close of the story feels like it works well and has a role in the story.

Am I happy with it? Erm, yes, mostly? I wish I’d made it sound more conversational and less self-consciously “spoken”. I think the images worked well in the end. I’m not sure how I feel about other people seeing it (but I’m still blogging it so I can’t be that worried…).

I think we were all pretty exhausted by the time we came to showcase what we’d produced to each other (and a few invited guests) and I felt a little flat at the end. I loved seeing the other stories and the different approaches we’d all taken and I felt like I should offer more than just applause at the end of each but maybe a mixture of tiredness and that we’d been working so intensely for the day meant it was difficult to think of valuable things to say. That not a reflection on the whole process or the quality of the other stories.

It was importat to experience the whole process as a participant. Without doing this training it would be harder to put myself in the position of someone who is being asked to do this as part of their project. I was surprised by the emotional highs and lows and the impact of the various successes and failures had on me. 

This course made me feel vulnerable and exposed, but in a good way (!). We were dealing with personal issues in our stories but just creating something that you have invested time a creativity into that is then shared is uncomfortable and the people we’ll be supporting will feel that too.

Taking it forward

I’m going to spend a bit more time reflecting on this but I want to be able to articulate (and blog about):

  • what I learnt about the benefits of telling stories
  • how this model of storytelling fits with the work that Netskills and Infonet are doing
  • being clear about purpose, audience and impact for JISC funded projects
  • how to write better stories.

Thanks to Alex for a great 4 day course and thanks to my co-participants for being supportive, encouraging, constructive and great fun into the bargain! 

 

 

 

 

Methodological tangle: phenomenology, ethnomethodology or symbolic interactionism?

Russian_dolls_zeta_

I’ve been reading up on different methodologies tonight and have been getting myself confused.

As I said in the last post I’m placing this research firmly in the “subjectivist” camp. Tonight I’ve been looking at what Cohen and Mannion (2007) say about naturalistic approaches to research (pp 19-26).

I want this research to be an immersive process, where I try to share the “frame of reference” of the people and groups I’m studying. The fact that I’m a participant in the field of project support means that trying to take a removed, objective perspective isn’t realistic. I’m trying to understand the situation from within. 

Cohen et al focus on 3 traditions within this naturalistic approach; Phenomenology, Ethnomethodology and Symbolic Interactionism.

At the moment I’m still trying to tell them apart. Here’s a summary of what I understand of each:

Phenomenology

The most important thing is the “subjective conscienciousness”, where and individual’s consciousness creates meaning based on experiences. It concerns understanding of the underlying meaning of “things”, stripping away assumtions based on how we perceive the world, influenced by cultural norms.

Ethnomethodology

The study of everyday activities, particularly social interactions. The focus is on how the sense that individuals have made of the world influences behaviours. The most important thing is how the individual perceives their reality. Research relies heavily on immersive fieldwork

Symbolic Interactionism

This is not something I’ve come across before so it’s the one I’m having most trouble understanding (It’s all relative, I’m not sure I understand the other two either!). SI seems to look more at how people’s actions are aligned to perceptions of how others might act but like the previous two is also concerned with the meanings that individuals ascribe to things. SI sees this process as something which is constantly in a state of flux.

Where do this leave me?

I’m not sure I’m able to draw clear lines between these 3 approaches. They all seem to hand on the idea of how meanings are constructed. This is especially relevant given my topic area. I said in a previous post that one of the functions of story is to help us ascribe meaning to experience so a methodology based on these naturalistic  approaches seems appropriate.

But even with this I’m getting myself tangled up. This dissertation is a story on the topic of the usefulness of story that relies on finding out the stories of the people that are involved in the process of telling stories. 

All I can think of is Russian dolls!

The fact is that I still want to want to take an ethnographic approach which will help me discover what it is like for teams undertaking these funded projects with a view to seeing how storytelling impacts on them. But I can also see that this idea of interactionism might be helpful. The teams exist and act in a context where they are trying secure funding, now and possibly in the future, from JISC so relations with programme managers will be important. They work for institutions that will be placing their own demands on them. And then there’s me, a proponent of storytelling who probably has a few ingrained assumptions about the value of storytelling and works for a company who has a strategic relationship with JISC.Innovation who is funding the projects.

I’m not sure I’m any the wiser!

Methodological Assumptions

Some initial thoughts about my research standpoint, based on Burrell and Morgan’s scheme for analysing assumptions about the nature of social science (1979, cited in Cohen et al (2007, p9))…

I don’t view the answers to my research questions existing in an objective form, independent of the actors involved. I’m dealing with story, something that is intrinsically subjective and human. The effectiveness of a story comes from its affectiveness; the emotional reponse that is created through narrative. Someone will respond to a story in one of a myriad ways, influenced by all sorts of psychological and sociological factors that are impossible to untangle.

There might be empirical studies into the physiological response to narrative but I don’t anticipate that they would be helpful in this context. Certainly the literature I’ve been reading doesn’t dwell on the scientific side of things.

So I take a strongly nominalist viewpoint.

As I’m assuming that knowledge is something “personal, subjective and unique” (Cohen et al, 2007 p7). To uncover people’s responses to stories and their attitudes towards them will mean me getting directly involved with the subjects. I won’t be able to gather data remotely or in a  way that avoids participation in some way. Exactly how, I’m not sure yet.

This is an anti-positivist approach.

People react differently to stories, as mentioned earlier. I’m working off the assumption that there is an unpredictable element to the use of story, no magic formula that will guarantee an automatic response in the audience. This doesn’t mean that you can’t make choices that influence how someone responds. Stories are cultural artefacts so involve aspects that will be recognisable to both creator and listener. The guidance I hope to provide in the project that this dissertation is linked to will be based on consciously using those aspects of story to achieve the desired effects.

My understanding of human nature is Voluntarist.

Lastly, this seems to call for an idiographic methodology. There will be a strong qualitative aspect to the research. My feeling is that although there may be some quantitative metrics that I could look at I would have to make some pretty large assumptions about a scientific basis for them. To give a simplistic example, I could look at the number of views a digital story posted on YouTube receives but I’m not sure I could use this to say there is a direct causal link between the way the elements of the story were compiled and its popularity. 

Notes of Caution

I don’t want to completely dismiss any notion of quantitative research method based on these assumptions. It may be that there will be useful quantitative data that I can use to help tell my story, I’m just not quite at the stage of deciding what that might look like yet.

Another warning bell going off is that it’s nice to have some big words to attach to my methodological approach, that doesn’t necessarily make them right. It feels right but that might be my own broader worldview and personal style at play. I need to keep this under scrutiny and reassess as I go. I’ve not addressed them critically yet. That’s my next step.

My colleague Will has been encouraging me to see this dissertation as telling a story. In this post I’ve talked about how project teams will be telling stories, but I’m part of that process too. This story will be “personal, subjective and unique” and that’s not something that I want to shy away from. But as I was saying to Will this evening, I don’t want to use that as an excuse for producing a piece of work that is ill-defined and full of woolly thinking!

Next steps

Read on to continue to critically examine these aspects of methodology and choose methods that will help me with the research.

Cohen L, Manion L & Morrson, K (2007) Research Methods in Education (6th edition), Routledge, Oxford.

 


 

 

 

Telling stories in the digital domain: 2 examples

This is a post from my other blog that I felt had a bit of a home here.

I’ve been reading a lot about narrative for my dissertation recently and came across 2 examples this morning that illustrate some of the ideas I’ve come across.

Oatmeal on Game of Thrones

The first simple example is from the Oatmeal. It says it’s about Game of Thrones but is actually about media companies completely misunderstanding the web.

One way of looking at storytelling is that it’s a way of framing complex, abstract concepts in a way that is both engaging, memorable and helps understanding. Some authors say that story is the primary way we understand the world.

So, with the Oatmeal example we have a simple depiction of an individual trying to do the right thin, being thwarted and finding, as the author sees it, a reasonable solution to the problem.

So, it takes some abstract points about the piracy debate, uses narrative to contextualise them, keep our interest, create an emotional response and hopefully make it more “sticky“.

Why is being in the digital domain important? As a static image it could have been published in a magazine or on a notice board. By being digital it give an audience a way of interacting and responding. At the most basic level it had over 6k likes and 2.5k shares on Facebook as well as 18.4k retweets. This helps the people that come across it incorporate it into their own personal and social narratives about piracy, IPR, SOPA, ACTA or whatever.

The Tale of the Invention of the Incredible Folding Plug

This is more of a distributed bunch of content telling a story.

Now the invention is plainly awesome in a why-has-this-not-been-done-before-it-could-transform-my-life way so I can immediately relate to it.

But what you also have around it through Rory Cellan Jones’ interview, the business’s website, the product demo (embedded above), and all the other mentions in the media (traditional and social) is a story about the product.

We have a cast of characters, a macguffin (the invention), a plot, setting, triumphs, hurdles to be overcome, quite a clear timeline and perhaps the possibility of a sequel.

Somehow, just watching the product demo (embedded above), although it contains some elements of story, doesn’t quite have enough of the human content to make it properly engaging.

My own reaction is that I’m thinking about the product in a much broader way, seeing how it would fit into my own life but also having it humanised by the story of its inventor and his business partner and how it fits into the wider narrative of startups and innovation in the UK.

“Motives that shape autobiographical narratives”

Following on from my previous post that started to look at narrative as the search for meaning, I wanted to focus on one article about the motives behind constructing narrative and think how it might apply the idea of project teams telling stories.

Baumeister and Newman (1994) delve a little deeper into the psychology behind personal stories by trying to determine what it is that makes the telling of stories so compelling. If creating stories is such an innate impulse (Garcia and Rossiter 2010) then it must be fulfilling some sort of need.

The last post looked at it as a way of creating meaning out of experiences and Baumeister and Newman add to that by offering 4 needs that drive the creation of stories. Some of these deal with the need to make sense of experience but to this they add the idea of “interpersonal manipulation” as a means of influencing others.

The four needs

  1. The need for purposiveness
  2. The need for justification and value
  3. The need for efficacy and control
  4. The need for self worth

Purposiveness in stories (1994, p681) is seeing a series of events as leading up to a particular goal as a way of making meaning out of experience; a way of saying that events in the past have been leading up to a particular future goal. For exmaple, I might talk about how being made redundant by T-Mobile in 2000, which at the time seemed like a metaphorical block in the road, was instrumental in moving me on in the next step of my career, firstly staying in the corporate world where I became disillusioned and so leading to working in education again, having left teaching in 1997.

With justification (1994, p683), we see stories framed by a sense of right and wrong, where we justify our actions on the understanding that “what one does is right and good.” The authors illustrate the powerfulness of this aspect of story in arguing our legal system is “based on exchanging, comparing, and corroborating narratives of crucial events” (1994, p685).

We use stories as a way of showing that we have the ability to shape our environments, have control over them rather than be at the mercy of them. When Hull and Katz (2006) talk about writing stories as a way of “creating an agentive self”, they are saying that the story, as well as showing how an individual had an effect on their situation, it reinforced this in the individual’s mind so it became part of their self-narrative. It’s interesting to think of this as a positive feedback loop.

Finally, with self-worth, “people make and tell stories to portray themselves as competent and attractive. Stories about past disasters (like being made redundant?) are defused to limit the damage to self worth. The authors contrast this with the second need by saying the need for justifation is seen terms of individual actions, whereas self-worth concerns affect the whole person.

Can this apply to stories of organisational change?

The first thing to be wary of is that this analysis is about autobiographical, personal stories, not stories about groups or projects but there still might be mileage in drawing comparisons or even just from a better understanding of what it is about stories we find attractive. Even so, I’m going to to limit my comparisons to thinking analogously for the moment.

Secondly, I’d be wary of explicitly talking about these “needs” as part of any support activities as the terms involved sound a bit underhand; “interpersonal manipulation”, “control”, “justification”.

But I think there is value in seeing stories as a way of engaging an audience to see the outcome of a project as having achieved a meaningful purpose and that it is considered “the right thing to have done” both in the case of the steps taken (justification) and the overall reason behind doing the project in the first place (self-worth). These projects are about acheiving change on various levels so they need to have efficacy. When it comes to idea of “manipulation” or influence, one of the hoped-for outcomes of these projects is that they will provide templates for adoption by other organisations and the story might be the route to a better understanding by those third parties of how and why they should proceed.

Also interesting is how the authors talk about stories in relation to memory, how narrative is container for abstract concepts (1994, p676). They conclude.

“Despite the apparent informational superiority of abstract propositions and generalizations, people often prefer naratives.” (1994, p688)

I’ll revisit this idea when I start examining the pedagogical apsects of storytelling.

Baumeister R and Newman L (1994) How Stories Make Sense of Personal Experiences: motives that shape autobiographical narratives, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 20, pp 676-690

Me as a storyteller

I Want to Live

Part of this dissertation is to take a critical look at my role in the storytelling support process. Reflecting on my own role as a storyteller is central to that.

I’m a storyteller because…

… the dissertation is a form of narrative. This research project is a journey. It has a start point, stages, obstacles to overcome and an eventual (happy?) ending. There may even be wrong turns, dead ends and unexpected detours. I want my dissertation to do two things; provide clarity on DS in the context I’m looking at and represent the qualitative experience of writing it. I see a strong paralel between what I’m doing and what the projects themselves are being asked to do.

… telling the story is part of me learning about my role and becoming a more conscious participant. Hopefully, I will be better at my job at the end of this MSc than at the start of it and how I regard myself will have changed. Hull and Katz (2006) talk about the role of storytelling in creating “agentive selves”. They describe this as;

“…[being] able to influence present circumstances and future possibilities, and to situate self in relation to others in socially responsible ways.” (2006, p71)

They used storytelling as a means to help individuals take that active role. As Lave and Wenger (1991) might put it , I’m a legitimate peripheral participant in the community of JISC project support. I want to be able to play an agentive role in that. Telling the story of my actions will demonstrate to me what I’m acheiving there as well as to the other people involved in my journey.

…it’s all about the “red pill”!

“…No one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself” Morpheus, The Matrix, Warner Brothers 1999

Alex Henry of Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums (who is one of the Dramatis Personae of this blog) argues that in order to help people create their own digital stories effectively you have to know what it is like to do it yourself. Will Allen, my colleague was talking about advocacy and authority behind stories as the things that make them trustworthy. So, I need to be able to demonstrate that digital storytelling is something that I do, not just something I talk about.

It’s something I already do. Here’s an example:

And today I signed up for the DS106 Digital Storytelling MOOC (Massive Online Open Course), partly to learn new skills and refine and rediscover old ones, but also to join a community of people that are also exploring it. Assignments will be posted on my public blog but I might also include them here, tagged as DS106, as well as reflecting on my progress with it.

Hull G and Katz M (2006) Crafting an Agentive Self: case studies of digital storytelling, Research in the Teaching of English, 41:1, pp 43-81

Lave J and Wenger E (1991) Situated Learning: legitimate peripheral participation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Image: I Want to Live by thejbird – By-NC