User story development
In my last blog[1] of February 13, 2017, I recalled my meeting with the team of the Connected Academy in January, when I learned how to apply digital learning in a course.
In two days the team came from a rough idea to a, in my eyes complex, but at the same time very clear layout for a course of 14 weeks on critical engagement with visual storytelling. Of course loads of details had to be fine-tuned, but the team pinpointed the core issue of the course and the layout of the 6 themes (with a last week, theme 7, as a wrap up of the former six), and the pedagogy of the curriculum.
The initial idea of a course on photojournalism, on storytelling with broad themes for six classes, changed in the first few hours of the meeting to a course on critical engagement. One reason for this was that online you can find a lot on visual storytelling already. I think another reason is the depth that everybody wants to give to the course and the feeling of a certain necessity to educate people on critical engagement. An image is so much more than just a picture of something.
User story
Therefore the team decided that next to the six classes built around six themes, an introduction course or toolkit should be created that learners can use before the classes or alongside the classes when they feel the need. It should give the learners a basic critical literacy. This curriculum gives answers to a number of questions: 1) What are you saying?, 2) Who are you saying it to?, 3) How are you saying it?, 4) Intended action/result/outcome (Why, to what aim?), 5) Why should they believe you? All of these questions are relevant for the classes and the discussions on the images to be used in the course or to be made by the learners. This curriculum consists of videos of experts on these questions, texts, blogs, etcetera.
In the six classes, each time the learners get a prompt, along with some of these five questions, to reflect on in order to bring forth their own image. Clustered in groups in a closed community they will discuss the questions and annotate the images that each of the learners brought to the class. In the class the learners are introduced to an image (or series) that represents one of the six themes. Three speakers reflect on the image from different angles. They talk about the key questions of the theme, their relationship with the image and their role in that image (as a maker, change-maker or storyteller). When the class, or the event, is made live, the learners enter into a twitter conversation. Afterwards the learners are asked to revise their own image picking a specific role themselves, and they publish their final image and the annotations to the entire community. After 12 weeks the learners will have a portfolio of six images which will be the input for the last module (week 13/14) and at the same time this module will be the cliff-hanger for the next course – yet to develop – on critical reading; on how do you represent yourself with the portfolio and how do you interpreted the images of your class.
The above is a short version of the user story that is the basis for the platform to be made for the Connected Academy. It doesn’t do fully justice to the complexity of the course structure, but it reflects the core ideas of the course.
Co-creation
It was beautiful to see how organic the meeting came from one idea to this more specific curriculum, the structure of the six classes and this cliff-hanger for the next course. I hoped to grasp how the partners narrowed their ideas to this concrete plan. But it was such a complex idea that until I read my notes I didn’t fully see the change in layout of the course. It is now, while writing and reading these notes, that I see that they started off from somewhere else. The strength of the process was, at least according to what I saw, that they followed each other’s ideas. None of them held on to the original content for the course. They followed each idea and added to it so the concept grew and got stronger. And they stayed focussed, so it got concrete again after new ideas where put on the table.
One of the team members is strong in abstraction and would come with the theoretical component. Another has a lot of experience on how to organize a (photography) course online with a class “onsite”. The WPPF brought in their goals and by this the reason for the course, since the pilot of the Connected Academy is their course. At the same time the WPPF partners were flexible in what the exact content would be. They also showed a large knowledge when it came to examples of images and possible speakers for the classes and curriculum. And they brought in the six partner institutes. I hadn’t mentioned these above; six institutes in different countries will give the classes “onsite”. This means guidelines for them will be developed as well.
Two of the team members kept track of the discussion, bringing the team back to where it was in the discussion and asked regularly, “Do we all agree on what is said?”, and “When is the course successful?” And one of them noted the sensitivities of issues, what image could raise problems for the audience, thus for the learners.
Of course they had some fierce discussions, but not on the content. The most troublesome question was: would participants have to register or not? But other questions raised, for example on budget (we will pay the teachers, and do we have commitment to build the first phase?) were easily countered, and so were content related issues such as which six themes to choose, and narrowing down all the different options; or the choice of images for the six classes.
I have seen discussion less structured and way more elaborate, usually caused by stubbornness to held on to own ideas, and by no focus in the discussion, jumping from one issue to another. In this Connected Academy meeting everybody stood open for what the other had to bring in, and experience and knowledge of everyone was respected. When dividing work, everyone has his or her own talent, or will find expertise within his or her network, and tasks were soon filled in.
[1] http://www.wendydevisser.nl/learning-how-to-apply-digital-learning-part-1/