Going dark

I’ve realised that it’s not going to be a good idea to have this blog as public for the time being.

It’s not that I’m likely to write anything upsetting to anyone, just that I want to have the freedom to write what I want without consciously trying to balance the needs of the, possibly quite broad range of, stakeholders in this project.

I was having an eportfolio-related discussion over Twitter at a conference last week about the whether there’s a difference between writing for reflection and writing for an audience.

My feeling is that both types are about identity-forming so it depends on what identities the writer wants to construct; one for the outward audience and one for the inward.

Some may be happy with these different identities being pretty much identical, but for the moment I’m unsure of myself and how I’m going to approach this dissertation and the work surrounding it. There are too many people with different priorities around this idea of storytelling fpr projects I don’t want to be sending out confusing messages to anyone….

…so I’m going dark and password protecting the blog.

Me as storyteller

My most recent storytelling workshop was last week. It went very well and I’ll write a proper update shortly.

One of the activities I asked the attendees to do was to create their own digital story on a topic of their choosing.

I encouraged them to do something personal but realised I couldn’t really ask them to do that if I wasn’t happy to do one myself – so here it is…

It’s edited on Adobe Premiere but I also did an identical one on Photo Story 3 for the sake of comparison. I was surprised that I could actually pretty much recreate it using the free Microsoft software.

Narrative Synthesis – a different angle on storytelling

A recent trawl of storytelling topics for reading brought up this: Narrative Synthesis. Not something I’d come across before.

I stumbled on it after finding this presentation by Popay, J et al (2005?) and I requested the full report that you can find by following the links in the presentation.

I don’t fully “get” what is is yet but as far as I can see it’s an approach to shaping social policy by looking at qualitative research from a wide range of sources and attempts to create a sort of meta-narrative of the findings. As the guidance document puts it:

“‘Narrative Synthesis'” refers to an approach to the systematic review and synthesis of finding s from multiple studies that relies primarily on the use of words and text (emphasis mine) to summarise and explain the findings of the synthesis. Whilst narrative synthesis can involve the manipulation of statistical data, the defining characteristic is that it adopts a textual approach to the process of synthesis to “tell the story” of the findings from the included studies.” (Popay, J et al 2006)

I need to figure out how this relates to my research questions but it’s certainly a useful addition to my literature review. I doesn’t take a leap of the imagination to consider where this document talks about the use of words and text, that that could be augmented with other digital media.

Popay, J, Roberts H, Sowden A, Petticrew M, Arai L, Rodgers M, Britten N, (2006) Guidance on the Conduct of Narrative Synthesis in Systematic Reviews: a product from the ESRC Methods Programme. Available on request via http://www.lancs.ac.uk/shm/research/nssr/research/dissemination/publications.php

 

 

Things taking a new turn


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Had an interesting discussion with a colleague at a partner JISC service, Andy Stewart, and Alex Henry of Tyne & Wear Archives and Museums (TWAM) on Tuesday.

Andy is interested in storytelling for the same reasons as I am so there is now the possibility of partnering with someone on this project.

We both were contacted by Alex after we attended the Culture Shock storytelling conference in Newcastle back in September – here’s my write up/social media amalgamation thingy.

The outcome of the meeting (which was over coffee and croissant at the lovely Blakes cafe in Newcastle) was that we want to investigate the possibility of using TWAM to deliver a programmeof training in digital storytelling to a number of JISC programme managers. Andy and I would also partake. The aims would be:

  • To demonstrate to programme managers the skills and approach involved in DS that they are asking their project teams to do
  • To provide space for discussion the benefits of DS for projects
  • To establish how Netskills and Infonet (Andy’s service) can make the programme sustainable.- e.g. coming up with guidance, events and resources for projects into the future
  • To open up discussion about how projects could use DS as part of their community engagement process (this is Andy’s main area of expertise).

Alex proposed a 3-4 day programme, probably spread over a number of weeks including a final showcase day.

    It’s an interesting and unexpected turn of events that makes the scope of the project slightly broader, involves more people and changes my role from an enthusiastic individual to being a team member.

    I need to think about how this changes the potential look of the dissertation.

    Finding reading material

    I’ve not got into reading properly yet so I’m going to try and set aside at least 30mins a night to it.

    So far, I’ve just been searching for articles. There seems to be plenty of stuff about using digital storytelling as a teaching tool, but not much about my specific area which is more on areas like engagement, personal reflection and organisational change.

    I’m going to try to broaden it out to look at blogging (which can be a form of storytelling) and the nature of narrative and it’s effects on communication. That’s all a bit vague but I’m hoping it will open up a few avenues.

    Research questions

    Without any form of quality control, this is a brain dump of all conceivable questions I might address except the ones I’ll think of tomorrow:

    Question of Questions

    • Does the telling of a projects stories have any measurable or perceivable impact on the progress and synthesis of outcomes of a given project?
    • What support needs to be in place to enable this, if this is the case?

    Questions about stories

    • What is the role of storytelling for JISC funded projects?
    • Do projects make good subjects for stories?
    • What types of stories should a project tell that support other forms of reporting?
    • Is it possible/helpful to identify types of technology that enable the effective telling of stories?
    • Can stories provide a complete alternative to traditional forms of reporting?
    • Who has most to gain from projects telling stories? The teams, the funding body, other organisations
    • What is the relative importance of the narrative over the channel through which it is delivered?

    Questions about organisationsal learning

    • Who are the stakeholders here? (Not a research question really but something I need to identify early on)
    • To what extent does the fact the stories exist affect how new knowledge is generated and transferred to other organisations?
    • Does the act of storytelling affect the type of organisational learning that goes on in the team? Single, double, triple loop?
    • Is there a perceived difference to the stakeholders between the use of storytelling to capture team experiences/milestones etc over alternative approaches such as blogging?
    • Does the recording of stories have any effect on the actual outcomes of the project or is it a completely separate endeavour? Feedback loops?
    • Is there an identifiable difference between the impact of 

    Questions about roles

    • Who is best placed within a team to tell the stories? Project leader, assigned role, whoever has the aptitude, all team members?
    • What support is needed to help the project teams tell their stories?
    • What sort of role is required to provide that support?

    More will come shortly I feel.

     

    Storytelling for projects

    Looking like the storytelling thing might be taking off.

    Institutions can bid for project funding from JISC under the heading of various programmes. JISC is keen to make sure that these project teams communicate their progress and project outcomes to the wider community. I guess it’s about accountability on one hand but more importnatly it’s about disseminating information and “synthesizing” the findings into something that can be picked up and used by other instritutions – it ensures that JISC is actually supporting the widest possible community.

    A recent call for bids in a programme of elearning stipulated that all successful bidders MUST use digital audio and video to provide a narrative of their project’s journey. The programme manager is Lawrie Phipps – it’s Lawrie who might end up being the project client for Netskills on this.

    Netskills is looking at how we can help support this dissemination. One area is using digital media (alongside social media) to create and share stories about progress. I’ve had an interest in digital storytelling since working in schools and it seems to have a good fit here.

    It’s an innovative approach, not seen much in the way of this sort of thing. Here’s a pretty sophisticated example from Leeds Uni –https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erXCSz7dr4U

    I can see a role in providing online and live training events, briefing papers and online training materials. I’d like to get closely involved in supporting some projects directly, otherwise it would just be a case of running some training and then letting them get on with it – not much change management there!

    Need to think what my research question is actually going to be and what I’m actually going to measure and evaluate.

    There’s some possibility of presenting the findings in something other than just written format. 

    Some early ideas

    2 very sketchy ideas I’ve been playing around with in my head. 

    1. Digital Storytelling for Research Projects

    Theres a growing amount of interest about using digital storytelling to support the sharing and synthesis of JISC funded projects. I’ve attached a briefing document I’ve done for a potential project sponsor/client. DS for Projects – Summary.pdf

    There are interesting possibilities here for thinking about using innovative technology to support an academic community, playing the role of technology steward, collaborative learning in and across teams.

    Likely activities would include running online seminars and live workshops but I think I’d also need to get involved in supporting one or more project teams directly to gather sufficient data.

    2. Observing informal learning

    I’m keen to learn about data visualisation techniques with a view to putting together some learning materials/events/project support activities etc. I’ll pretty much have to learn about it from scratch, finding out about:

     

    • Finding sources of data
    • Current best pratice (Hans Rosling, David McCandless etc)
    • Basic graphic design techniques
    • Available tools
    • etc etc etc

     

    I know that there are a number of people in and out of the Netskills team that are also inetersted in this subject so wanted to try out an open “Enquiring Minds” style collaborative approach based around a community wiki and linking to individuals’ blogs, tweets etc.#

    It would be a good opportunity to try out a ethnographic research methods to describe how the community would work.

    Would be good to look at issues like affinity spaces, communities of practice and distributed cognition.

    This is potentially more interesting than the first but more riskiy – what if noone else gets involved? 

    Starting out

    And here we go

    Yay! Passed the diploma, as did everyone else in the cohort. Hope Helen does OK catching up. 

    Just the trifling matter of a dissertation to complete now!

    It’s going to feel strange working back in Blackboard again. We haven’t really touched it in the last year and just starting to blog again now has reminded me of a few of the “attributes”of Bb I really found unhelpful and was hoping would be ironed out for the new version. Whither RSS feeds, or just a notifications page to show who’s recently updated or commented?

    Anyway, I need to come up with a few choices for what my topic can be and true to form I’m fixating on one idea at the moment and can’t get it out of my head to think about other stuff.

    Brainstorming some general themes that I’d like to consider:

    • Professional development
    • Informal learning
    • Peer networks of learners
    • Open models of learning
    • Expert/Apprenticeship relationships
    • Role of the “technology steward” (Wenger)
    • Distributed cognition
    • Collaborative learning
    • Digital ethnography
    • Social media in learning
    I’m pretty sure that I want to take up the challenge from the Hasselt conference to produce the final thing in an innovative format but one that is appropriate to the nature of the research. Exactly what, though, I’ll leave till later to decide.