Reflecting on Scholarly Storytelling
Well, hello there, work blog. It’s been a tremendously busy middle of the semester – to say nothing of this past week – and I know I haven’t posted much lately. I wanted to get back in the swing of things and comment on the Scholarly Storytelling workshop that I co-presented at Media Commons Tailgate 2011.
Scholarly Storytelling kicked off with around 20 people in attendance. The audience was mostly made up of campus staff with a few faculty members and one student thrown in to the mix. Several folks have worked on media projects before and the majority were there to learn how to make the projects they are developing or assigning as academically rigorous as possible. Therefore, it was the right crowd.
Ryan Wetzel and Anne Behler did the bulk of the presenting of materials, owing to the fact that Ryan has been developing and refining the workshop in conjunction with the Knowledge Commons project. My role was to present the collaborative tool we would be asking them to use – and, in theory, that they would then encourage students to use on real projects – during the hands on portion of the event.
We chose to emphasize building a collaborative project notebook, research collection and eventual storyboard using Spaaze (view the sample board we made for the workshop). Spaaze is basically an infinite cork board that allows users to pin on it numerous types of media gathered from all over the internet. This blank canvas really does lend itself well to the way that we see students organize their materials and presents an opportunity for faculty and support staff (including us) to check in on group progress.
It’s also darned cool. Hannah Inzko has been a champion of Spaaze for some time now and it was great to put it to a practical application in the workshop.
The response to Spaaze was generally positive (view a workshop example board) – though we did find some holes in its iPad implementation. Lots of questions about ways to integrate it into specific projects were asked of us as well as whether or not we could support it by teaching students how to use it in the classroom.
The other items that seemed to gain a lot of attention actually came before the Spaaze demo and hands on session, though. Ryan and I had developed a novel way of citing source material in a video. By numbering each source and then displaying the number subtly on screen during its use we were able to link the materials unobtrusively. We then placed the numbered sources in a Google doc (again, allowing for student collaboration in collecting materials) and used a QR code at the end of the video to take people directly to the citations.
This was a revelation to many and worked so elegantly that I plan to offer it as a suggestion going forward when consulting on new projects. I’m also going to be rolling out the workshop across the Commonwealth beginning on November 29th at Greater Allegheny where I will be co-presenting with head librarian Courtney Young. I’ll check back in with an update on the shortened version of the presentation!