Beyond School

I gave this presentation at the Apple Distinguished Educators Institute in Bangkok in December of 2007. The conference room was freezing, to explain the ski cap.

Not only does it tell the story of how the international school I work at went 1:1, how that groundswell was created, how admin was persuaded to choose Macs instead of PC’s (hint: comparing total cost of ownership destroys the expense myth), and the challenges of staff and student training; it also shows exemplars of digital teaching and learning in a biology and language arts classroom, as well as highlighting my own teaching journey since embracing technology in my language arts and history classrooms.

Added bonus: it also includes the first showing of the Students 2.0 promotional video produced and scored by Sean “The Bassplayer” Law of Scotland. ADE saw it days before the launch of s2oh, because the ADE Institute was during the fourth week of our pre-launch preparations for that experiment.

Finally, the presentation itself was a conscious attempt to model a minimalism I want my students - text- and bullet-junkies all - to emulate. And to provide information via not exposition, but metaphor and story. My goal was to inform without being a bore. (More on this presentation angle below the video, in a comment I left on an Anthony Chivetta post on Students 2.0 on teaching design to students - what I call “cutting the crap“.)

Here it is. It’s 30 minutes long. As you’ll read below, everybody else was stopped at 20 minutes. It’s not because I was better. It’s because my slides were. And my story.

The Backstory: It Takes a Story. It Doesn’t Take Bullet Points.

Storytelling is prior to and higher than design. Who wants a well-designed crappy story? (And maybe we should call this narrative, not storytelling, to open the frame wide enough to accommodate expository presentations?)

Here’s a story: I was one of three teachers asked to give a presentation at the Apple Distinguished Educator institute in Bangkok last month. We all were asked to address issues in 1:1 laptop schools.

The first guy gave a slideshow about his 4-year old laptop school. Lots of slides, lots of text, lots of pictures, lots of information. When he reached the alloted 20 minutes, he was told to finish up within a minute.

The second guy gave a slideshow with lots of examples of digital student work (much of it, I’m sorry to say, in need of crap-cutting and worse, to echo Dan, ideas worth watching in the first place - probably as much the teachers’ fault as the students, since the teachers assign this stuff). He also got fetishistic, predictably, about tools he uses. Jing this, Skitch that, blah blah blah.

When his 20 minutes were up, he was asked to wrap up in one minute.

(His school was an 18-month-old laptop school, by the way.)

It was my turn next. Imagine my joy at continuing the Chinese water torture with 20 more minutes of my own dripping slideshow.

I gave the presentation. When it was over, I said, “Was that shorter than my alloted 20 minutes?” The Apple guy said, “No - you went 30 minutes.”

Here’s why I think he didn’t make me finish:

1. I did have a story. I knew the age of the other two presenters’ laptop programs - again, 4 years for one, and the other 18 months - and I knew my own school’s 1:1 program was only 4 months old. So I gave this expository speech a metaphor: “Our 1:1 Baby Book.” The narrative thread of this informational “story” was: Conception - Labor - Birth - Potty Training.

To riff off some academic I read years ago in a literary theory graduate course, by giving the information some “narrative rails,” the audience enjoyed the ride and kept anticipating what was coming next.

And the occasional use of “ass” and “poopy” didn’t hurt, either. Somehow we need to mention emotion and voice in all of this. I didn’t talk like some constipated suit trying to impress. I was a guy in love with his story, telling it like the playful, caffeinated, silly bastard I enjoy being. I used my voice.

2. Also, Dean’s “design matters” and other explorations I’ve done since influenced my visual design. I had my story, but I wanted visuals without words. Pictures only. I didn’t quite succeed. I used slide titles and single-word lines of text. But to know my story and receive its information, you had to listen to me tell it. You couldn’t read it along with me.

A picture of a pregnant belly rising from a bubble-bath, of a new-born still gooey and umbilical in a doctor’s hands, of a poopy diaper-changing moment in some Flickr’d household - that was the bulk of my slideshow.

–

I still have a headache, but will try to sum up:

1. As Dan says (and hasn’t Warlick been stressing “telling a new story” for about a century?): storytelling first. I would add - and this was the point of my story - even expository can be transformed into a story via metaphor, extended analogy, allegory, etc. I got ten extra minutes to blather because people wanted to hear how my school is raising its baby. People like babies, generally (”especially with a little salt and pepper,” as WC Fields said ).

2. Visual design: I go back to Dean’s thrust - throw out the templates, eschew text, and arrest with less.

Oops. My twenty minutes was up a long time ago.

People referenced in the presentation: Jason Spivey, Justin Medved, Kim Cofino, Anthony Armstrong, Chris Watson