In a recent blog post by Henry Jenkins, he brings together contributors to a new book called Teaching Tech Savvy Kids. It’s a great two part post and they cover a lot of ground.

They talk about the importance of play. Of collaboration. And of not providing ‘canned’ applications for educators. This supports part of what I learned from Storytelling X.0. That storytelling will become less about the story and more about providing a curated narrative space. This space can be IMing, a blog, a social network, etc. And THAT is what we’re all about.

I was also particularly interested in their take on remixing in the classroom, where copyright infringment is almost bound to occur.
Erin Reilly said: “Teachers can guide youth to better reflect on these new forms of creation and know the difference between plagiarism and appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content.” This last part is exactly what differentiates copyright infringement and art.

When courts are debating these very issues, it strikes me that we first need to be able to tell the difference. Kudos to these writers, researchers and educators for helping to educate me.

So check out the Blog

Then the Book

Then join in the discussion.

Last week I attended a one day symposium about Transmedia storytelling. Say, what? Transmedia is just a fancy way of saying stories that take place across platforms. This is not to say cross platform. Cross platform is taking a book and displaying that book on an ereader device. Transmedia is exploiting the advantages of a device/platform and tailoring or writing content specifically to maximize the potential of the device/platform.

So if I’ve got that out of the way, I want to mention a few cool points. The first is regarding interactivity.

Sometimes when I try to explain to people my digital projects they liken it to online Choose Your Own Adventure. Not the case. I don’t consider this interactive, at least not on its own. Why? There will always be one choice that tells the best story. The author will always be hoping you pick one direction, over another. True, perhaps different people will get more out of one direction than another, but from the standpoint of story, there will always be one choice that tells a better story. This has always been a pet peeve of mine and it was nice to have panelists agree.

Another pointer which I found helpful was to provide progress reports to your audience. Game developers use maps or status bars, and levels, to show how far you’ve come and how far you have left to go. We can learn from that. So, readers/players/consumers like to see progress. Incorporate that into your Internet sprawling story, linear or not.

And finally, if you are going to allow choice, or have the audience influence the story, then be sure to make the reward immediate and obvious. There are examples of broadcasters who allowed the audience to influence story with texting, but it was done in an aggregate, so individuals often didn’t get their way. In another example, the impact of the choice was too subtle for the audience to catch and in another it was too far into the narrative for the audience to recall.

I thought these were good constructive learnings. I pass them along.