The NPR Model of Teaching through Storytelling - Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning
NPR listeners have had the experience of sitting in their car with the radio on after arriving at their destination simply because they could not tear themselves away from a fascinating segment. By contrast, most online students have had the experience of suffering through boring course content that produces little knowledge retention. The difference is not between entertainment and learning. NPR has some of the most educational content available, so much so that I use a series of NPR stories about healthcare financing and reform in my medical ethics course. The difference is in the way that the information is conveyed, and by adopting the simple principles used by NPR a faculty member can radically transform the power and effectiveness of their online content.
How to open pieces of narrative non-fiction writing, conference talks, and sticky jars- for people trying to get better at narrative, non-fiction, opinionated writing like essays, blog posts, and conference talks. Opening well isn't just about snapping up someone's attention and keeping them reading for a few lines. You can't write good openings without having good ideas, good arguments, good structure, and good storytelling skills. Everything hangs off that starting point, so it's worth learning how to nail it.
Co-Producing Tolerant Futures aims to expose and challenge divisive uses of the Iron Age and Roman past uncovered during the Ancient Identities in Modern Britain project (2016-2019, AHRC-funded). Findings from this project showed that the Iron Age and Roman periods are often presented through dichotomies and exaggerated caricatures in formal and free-choice learning environments in Britain. The research also suggested that, later on in their adult life, people draw on these early impressions and dualistic understandings of the past to justify antagonism towards particular groups defined on the basis of ethnicity, culture and race. Co-Producing Tolerant Futures through Ancient Identities challenges these uses by developing the Chatterpast education training resources to promote more nuanced and less binary interpretation of the Iron Age and Roman past at heritage venues and in primary school classrooms.
Hopepunk, explained: the storytelling trend that weaponizes optimism - Vox
In the modern world, we find most of our rebellious clusters of artists online. So it makes sense that the literary world’s most defiant response to impending climate disaster and the rise of right-wing extremism around the globe has not been voiced from the pages of prestigious literary reviews, but rather from the home of one of the internet’s most stridently progressive and rowdily defiant creative communities: Tumblr. “The opposite of grimdark is hopepunk,” declared Alexandra Rowland, a Massachusetts writer, in a two-sentence Tumblr post in July 2017. “Pass it on.” With this simple dictum, the literary movement known as hopepunk was born.
The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes | EPJ Data Science | Full Text
Advances in computing power, natural language processing, and digitization of text now make it possible to study a culture’s evolution through its texts using a ‘big data’ lens. Our ability to communicate relies in part upon a shared emotional experience, with stories often following distinct emotional trajectories and forming patterns that are meaningful to us. Here, by classifying the emotional arcs for a filtered subset of 1,327 stories from Project Gutenberg’s fiction collection, we find a set of six core emotional arcs which form the essential building blocks of complex emotional trajectories. We strengthen our findings by separately applying matrix decomposition, supervised learning, and unsupervised learning. For each of these six core emotional arcs, we examine the closest characteristic stories in publication today and find that particular emotional arcs enjoy greater success, as measured by downloads.
Researchers analysed over 1700 novels to reveal six story types – but can they be applied to our most-loved tales? Miriam Quick takes a look. “My prettiest contribution to the culture” was how the novelist Kurt Vonnegut described his old master’s thesis in anthropology, “which was rejected because it was so simple and looked like too much fun”. The thesis sank without a trace, but Vonnegut continued throughout his life to promote the big idea behind it, which was: “stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper”. In a 1995 lecture, Vonnegut chalked out various story arcs on a blackboard, plotting how the protagonist’s fortunes change over the course of the narrative on an axis stretching from ‘good’ to ‘ill’. The arcs include ‘man in hole’, in which the main character gets into trouble then gets out again (“people love that story, they never get sick of it!”) and ‘boy gets girl’, in which the protagonist finds something wonderful, loses it, then gets it back again at the end. “There is no reason why the simple shapes of stories can’t be fed into computers”, he remarked. “They are beautiful shapes.” "Thanks to new text-mining techniques, this has now been done. Professor Matthew Jockers at Washington State University, and later researchers at the University of Vermont’s Computational Story Lab, analysed data from thousands of novels to reveal six basic story types – you could call them archetypes – that form the building blocks for more complex stories. The Vermont researchers describe the six story shapes behind more than 1700 English novels
Free and Open Source Stories Digital Archive Foundation – Telling the Story of a Movement that Changed the World
As a new generation of tech innovators emerges, the FOSSDA Project aims to uncover and record the stories of the first generation of free and open source software developers, visionaries and strategists who challenged the establishment and changed how we interact with the world.
TheirStory streamlines the process of collecting, preserving, and engaging with the audiovisual stories of a community. Whose stories do you want to capture? Why are they important to you? How will you use them to spark discussion or inspire others to action? Whether you want to capture a loved one's story, surprise a loved one with stories from their friends, or elicit stories from an entire community, TheirStory helps to streamline the process of collecting, preserving, and putting to use the stories that make us who we are.
"Previously on Math Class" - by Dan Meyer - Mathworlds
“Previously on [TV Show],” says the announcer in a flashback at the start of the show, followed by excerpts from previous episodes. Those flashbacks are, psychologically speaking, an attempt to take our “inert knowledge” of the show and activate it, making that knowledge available for new stories. The flashbacks remind us of a character’s nature because we are about to learn something new and different about that nature. We are reminded of events that happened in a particular place because we are about to see new and different events in that place. Paul Silvia’s research found that interest is generated by situations that are both novel and familiar. The flashback generates familiarity and the new episode generates novelty.
Within the pages of The Storyteller's Handbook whole worlds are waiting for you. There is a giant cat sleeping against a city corner, a flying bathtub of squirrels, serious lions and pensive rabbits. You will visit the stars and dive into the deepest ocean, find jungles and explore cities. On every page is an adventure in progress, a mystery to ponder, characters to name and an invitation to build stories that only you can create. This is a wordless picture book of 52 fantastical images, created by illustrator Elise Hurst, and with a foreword by Neil Gaiman. It is a book full of storytelling ingredients to help your imagination fly, which means that for every person who opens the book, the stories that spring to life will be unique. There are so many intricate details. What will you notice? What happens next? And where will this experience take you? There are no rules, just a beautiful enticement to come and play.
Barry Lopez on Storytelling and His Advice on the Three Steps to Becoming a Writer – The Marginalian
One of the most poignant, precise takes on the power and secret of storytelling I have ever encountered comes from Barry Lopez (January 6, 1945–December 25, 2020), whose vast and varied body of work illuminates with uncommon radiance the interleaving of nature and human nature — the way our relationship with Earth and the universe shapes our relationship with ourselves and each other. “It is through story that we embrace the great breadth of memory, that we can distinguish what is true, and that we may glimpse, at least occasionally, how to live without despair in the midst of the horror that dogs and unhinges us.”
This Magazine → This Vancouver teacher turned her master’s thesis into a comic book
It’s been said that the medium is the message, but how much say do we have over which mediums shape our experiences—and how might they shape our education? Meghan Parker, an art teacher at a public high school in North Vancouver, considers this question in her recent thesis, “Art teacher in process: An illustrated exploration of art, education and what matters”—a 268-page comic book created for her master’s in arts education at Simon Fraser University. Challenging conceptions that scholarship should be textual—“12-point font, Times New Roman,” as Parker puts it—her work demonstrates how scholarship can be artful and that art can be scholarly. The thesis is structured into chapters titled after the seven elements of art—line, colour, form, texture, shape, space, and value—which act as real-life metaphors for Parker’s inquiries. Together, the elements converge to form a site of praxis, where the theories and thinkers Parker engages with are in direct conversation with reflections and questions toward her own methods as an art teacher.
Elaine McMillion Sheldon is an Academy Award-nominated and Peabody-winning documentary filmmaker. She has been nominated for six Emmy awards, is a 2021 Creative Capital Awardee, a 2021 Livingston Award Finalist, and a 2020 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. She’s currently in-production on a feature-length documentary “King Coal,” which has received support and funding from the Sundance Documentary Institute, Creative Capital, Tribeca Film Institute, Catapult Film Fund, First Look Media, and the West Virginia Humanities Council. Sheldon is the director of two Netflix Original Documentaries - "Heroin(e)" and "Recovery Boys" - that explore America's opioid crisis. "Heroin(e)" was nominated for a 2018 Academy Award and won the 2018 News and Documentary Emmy Award for Outstanding Short Documentary. The short film premiered at the 2017 Telluride Film Festival and went on to screen hundreds of times across America as part of a community-driven impact campaign.
AI Platforms for Interactive Storytellers | MIT – Docubase
At the beginning of 2018, I curated a list of five accessible tools aimed at anyone with basic Python scripting abilities for _Docubase. I was a beginner in the field of machine learning and overwhelmed by its complexity. Machine learning can be a fantastic tool for creators, but integrating AI into your workflow is a challenge for those who don’t have much coding experience. Two years later I recognize it was naive of me to think that it is possible to just “discover the complex ideas and building blocks of deep learning and machine learning technology” with only basic familiarity with Python. The responsibility to uncover and challenge the stories behind the machine learning algorithms is not on the individual itself but on the creative community as a whole. Luckily, wonderful people are thinking creatively about how we can bring everyone into the process of working with complex technologies. It is our responsibility towards one another. I hope this will encourage more people to join the conversation and diversify the voices that manufacture our reality. In the last two years, more accessible platforms have been developed; therefore, we find it necessary to update this list.
Story Dice creative story ideas by Dave Birss - speaker, author, film-maker
How to use story dice As you can see above, you get five story dice (or nine dice, if you prefer), each with a random image on it. Your job is quite simply to turn these prompts into a story. I recommend you try to work with the order they appear on the screen but if you’re finding it tough, you can do some swapsies. You also don’t need to take the image literally. You can use the dice metaphorically or as representations of other concepts. For example, a slice of pizza could represent food in general, cutting a slice out of something, Italy, gooiness, a chef and a heap of other more obscure things. The job of the dice is not necessarily to provide you with literal objects to work with but concepts to nudge your thinking in fresh directions.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being Opaque to Ourselves: Milan Kundera on Writing and the Key to Great Storytelling – Brain Pickings
This might be the most transcendent capacity of consciousness, and the most terrifying: that in the world of the mind, we can construct models of the real world built upon theories of exquisite internal consistency; that those theories can have zero external validity when tested against reality; and that we rarely get to test them, or wish to test them. Just ask Ptolemy. In its clinical manifestation, we call this tendency delusion. In its creative manifestation, we call it art — the novel, the story, the poem, the song are each a model, an imagistic impression of the world not as it is but as the maker pictures it to be, inviting us to step into this imaginary world in order to better understand the real, including ourselves. Great storytelling, then, deals in the illumination of complexity — sometimes surprising, sometimes disquieting, always enlarging our understanding and self-understanding as we come to see the opaque parts of ourselves from a new angle, in a new light
99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style (2005) is a seriously playful exploration of the possibilities and potential of comics and storytelling. It was inspired by the French author Raymond Queneau’s 1947 book Exercises in Style (Fr Eng), itself inspired by Bach’s Art of the Fugue. The book is based on a simple one-page anecdote which I re-draw and re-tell 99 times in different genres and drawing styles, in the form of homages and parodies, and in formal experiments that test the boundaries of the medium of comics.
Before people accept a solution, they have to agree there’s a problem. Telling a story—and illustrating their part to play—can make transformation easier
Dana said this was the best thing that had been written about him and linked to it for years so besides being flattered (after all it was just using his words) I liked it too. Dana died in San Francisco December 13, 2000. Many of the links within this story were still alive for years, now link rot has forced me to the Wayback Machine, holder of all web memories. The Dana’s Next Exit site ‘died’ in 2014 which surprised me (and immediately made my webservers shudder – are we next?) even though I know that anything you do online is ephemeral.
There Are Only 37 Possible Stories, According to This 1919 Manual for Screenwriters | Open Culture
The year was 1919. America's biggest blockbusters included D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms, Cecil B. DeMille's Male and Female, and The Miracle Man, which made Lon Chaney into a silver-screen icon. The many aspirants looking to write their way into the ever more celebrated and lucrative movie business could turn to a newly published manual called Ten Million Photoplay Plots by Wycliff Aber Hill. "Hill, who published more than one aid to struggling 'scenarists,' positioned himself as an authority on the types of stories that would work well onscreen," writes Slate's Rebecca Onion. In this book he provides a "taxonomy of possible types of dramatic 'situations,' first running them down in outline form, then describing each more completely and offering possible variations." Hill's 37 basic dramatic situations include such "happy situations" as "rescue," "loved ones lost and recovered," and "a miracle of God"; such "pathetic situations" as "love's obstacles," "rivalry between unequals," and "a mystery"; and such "disastrous situations precipitated without criminal intent" as "possessed of an ambition," "enmity between kinsmen," and "vengeance." (Naturally, Hill also includes a separate category involving criminal intent.) These dramatic concepts then break down into more specific scenarios like "rescue by strangers who are grateful for favors given them by the unfortunate one," "an appeal for refuge by the shipwrecked," "the sacrifice of happiness for the sake of a loved one where the sacrifice is caused by unjust laws," and "congenial relations between husband and wife made impossible by the parents-in-law."
This activity builds off of various line drawings exercises I do in class, including Grids & Gestures, along with the use of lines from Tristram Shandy & Vonnegut’s Shape of Stories (see the video of Vonnegut online). For your “story line”, think of an arc of your life – either recent months or your whole life, and make a line that represents your experiences. Interpret as you wish.
The use of narrative to provide a cohesive structure for a web based computing course - Open Research Online
Narrative has long been used as an educational tool. This article explains how narrative, in the form of popular accounts, has been used to provide context, structure and broad appeal to a large-scale, entry-level university course on Information and Communication Technology (ICT). This course is delivered via the web with online tuition. Students' responses to the use of narrative and the scope of the material has been encouraging. It is argued that narrative performs an enculturation function that is often under-utilised in ICT education.
Disney's Imagineering in a Box allows you to explore different aspects of theme park design, from characters to ride development. Get ready to bring your own magic as you design a theme park of your very own! Imagineering in a Box is designed to pull back the curtain to show you how artists, designers and engineers work together to create theme parks. Go behind the scenes with Disney Imagineers and complete project-based exercises to design a theme park of your very own.
Timeline enriches our understanding of the present by telling stories of the past. Drawing on the best evidence, sources, and information available, we use the narratives of history to bring context to the news and issues of today. Through text, images, and video we change the way people think about now.
This past week I have been reading interview transcripts for a client. After reading several of these 20-page documents it became clear what was able to hold my attention — stories, especially first person accounts. I also remember the stories much better than the general discussions or advice given. One of the simplest definitions of storytelling is by Jonathan Gottschall in The Storytelling Animal — Story = Character + Predicament + Attempted Extrication. However, I will close with a word of caution. While storytelling skills may be important, a critical network era skill — as we get inundated with stories on social media — will be the ability to deconstruct stories, or story skepticism. Thinking critically about how a story affects us emotionally is important before hitting the Tweet or Post buttons that are now so handy on our smart devices. We need to become story skeptics so that the many emerging and deceptive storytellers do not lead us astray.
Video: Deepfake Project Reimagines Nixon’s Apollo 11 Speech
But what if the Apollo mission ended in a catastrophe—a distinct possibility given the tremendous risks? What would the speech have looked like on TV, and how would Nixon’s words have sounded like to American ears? A new art installation called In the Event of a Moon Disaster Project imagines this exact scenario by applying a rather infamous emerging technology: deepfake videos. Deepfakes, of course, are those pernicious videos in which, usually, celebrities, politicians, and other high-status individuals do and say things they most certainly did not. A typical deepfake involves pre-existing footage of an individual, such as Barack Obama or Vladimir Putin, and an artificial neural network does the rest, modifying both the audio and the video to twist a person’s words. In this case, the creators of the Moon Disaster project applied Nixon’s unsaid Apollo 11 failure speech to archival footage of the U.S. president—and it’s actually quite realistic.
