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This is part of a short series of posts where I reflect on the inaugural Intel Education Visionaries meet up in Santa Clara, California in October 2015.
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I really enjoyed Dr Wayne Grant's Presentation on Transmedia Education. Much of the presentation was covered under NDA so I can’t share some of the things that we saw here but I am able to cover some of the more general points.
Firstly, if you unfamiliar with Transmedia Education then you might find this definition from Wikipedia helpful?
“Transmedia Storytelling (also known as transmedia narrative or multiplatform storytelling, cross-media seriality) is the technique of telling a single story or story experience across multiple platforms and formats including, but not limited to, games, books, events, cinema and television.“
I liked this this short animation that was shown at the start of the presentation that shows quite nicely the sorts of things that are now possible within the domain of real-life and digital story telling in a rapidly interconnected world.
Wayne was all about engagement (and why wouldn’t he be!) and I liked the model he shared on the stages of student engagement from rebellion through compliance to true (and deep) engagement.
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I hadn’t really though about stages of engagement linked to student classroom behaviours before and I can see how I might use this as we continue to develop and build on our already successful our self-evaluation procedures at the school.
Wayne also talked about some emerging transmedia elements on the horizon and encouraged us to think about the power of custom software and custom hardware and how much more effective they can be if they are combined.
To illustrate this we took a sneak preview of a number of quite interesting kickstarter projects such as:
- Moff - http://www.moff.mobi - Augmenting physical play
- Linkitz - http://www.linkitz.com/ - a smart, code-able, friendship bracelet
Linkitz Kickstarter video May 2015 from linkitz on Vimeo.
We also looked at some more established products in the context of transmedia education such as:
- Conductor - http://www.conducttr.com - Interactive, multi-media, story telling tool.
- Pixton – www.pixton.com - online interactive comics (and an old favorite of mine that I first discovered at BETT 2009)
Finally, he also mentioned Project MC2 (a Netflix commissioned original series).
Products like Project MC2 are exciting for me as they have very high production values but the learning behind them is also very sound. Kind of reminds me of lots of the work we used to do around commercial off the shelf (COTS) games at the Consolarium. I’ll be checking out MC2 as soon as I get a chance because the short piece that I saw was very impressive – I also heard that it has been recommissioned for a second season?
With Intel’s acquisition of Kno (now Intel Education Study) in recent times hopefully we will start to see more Transmedia elements built into their software stack?
BTW – if you like the idea of Transmedia Education then do check out Inanimate Alice which is just a first class super product.