The Open Data Meme

Here it is in today's Times: "Rare Sharing of Data Leads to Progress on Alzheimer’s". The article goes on to report the leaps in our understanding of the progression of Alzheimer’s disease in the human brain, traced back to the work of scientists and executives from the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and others from industry, beginning in 2003. Evidence of the value of the sharing comes with new tools for early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s using methods like PET scans and tests of spinal fluid. "More than 100 studies are under way to test drugs that might slow or stop the disease.

And the collaboration is already serving as a model for similar efforts against Parkinson’s disease. A $40 million project to look for biomarkers for Parkinson’s, sponsored by the Michael J. Fox Foundation, plans to enroll 600 study subjects in the United States and Europe.....the key to the Alzheimer’s project was an agreement not just to raise money, not just to do research on a vast scale, but also to share all the data, making every single finding public immediately, available to anyone with a computer anywhere in the world." (NYT, Aug 13, 2010).

This links nicely to the book we were tipped to recently while visiting at the Census Bureau, "Open Government"** a collection of essays that center around technology as an enabler of the meme. This from the text:

"Government 2.0 is not a new kind of government; it is government stripped down to its core, rediscovered and re-imagined as if for the first time. … There is a new compact on the horizon: information produced by and on behalf of citizens is the lifeblood of the economy and the nation; government has a responsibility to treat that information as a national asset. Citizens are connected like never before and have the skill sets and passion to solve problems affecting them locally as well as nationally. Government information and services can be provided to citizens where and when they need them. Citizens are empowered to spark the innovation that will result in an improved approach to governance. In this model, government is a convener and an enabler rather than the first mover of civic action."

The meme has escaped even its early proponents. Openness will be seen, this blog believes, not just germane to data, but to all forms of information. Despite the controversy around the Wiki Leaks' and specific foreign policy issues, the Obama administration's position on openness and transparency* is already underway at the cabinet level in his government. It did not begin there (for example: the NIH's initiative originated during the second Bush administration), nor will transparency go away because it inevitably winds up putting governments in the hot seat.

This is not, strictly speaking about communications technology. Openness has been possible since Gutenberg. Technology is not the driver. Culture is.

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*http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/08/12/race-top-openness-and-innovation-announcing-agency-open-government-plan-leading-prac
** Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice By Daniel Lathrop, Laurel Ruma Publisher O'Reilly Media Released: February 2010

The Learning Limits of Animation? (MM pattern)

What's better, a movie clip of an internal combustion engine, or a series of stills depicting the critical phases of the combustion cycle? Evidently there is some pretty solid evidence that, at least as far as learning goes, there is little added value in watching an animation of dynamic physical processes over looking at comparable, but static graphics.

Moving illustrations may be prettier, and take up more "reel" time, but based on experimental evidence (referenced below), it seems that learners can do as well or better looking at the stills. Why?


A couple of explanations are possible. One is that the sheer speed and control of the animation may outpace the viewers ability to grasp it.  Second, the moving depiction of complex processes may result in too many visual elements to observe at once. If two or more critical events occur simultaneously in the animation, the viewer may not catch them. Suppose we are looking at a cross-sectional view of a 4-cycle engine. In the time-locked presentation style of movies or television, where the learner has no control of the time-sequence, it may be difficult to see the relationship of say, the piston rods down here and the valve lifters over there on the camshaft at a given moment in time.

From a contstructivist perspective, this makes sense. Animation may be inherently more interesting at first, due to our visual brain's "orienting reflex", gaining initial attention. Understanding the action depicted however, requires independent construction, one where we perform the animation in our heads. We can do this more readily when the action is frozen and critical elements are juxtaposed and labeled properly. Putting the static pieces together allows the learner to form concepts transferrable beyond the lesson.  A little of our earlier discussion of best practices for voice-over and onscreen text can help us round out this pattern.

What does the science tell us is the best practice then for demonstrating dynamic processes?

1. Offer clear visuals, the more diagrammatic the better (excluding distracting detail)
2. Offer a "structuring explanation" with VO or text (not both)
3. Offer them as stills, allowing the user to spend as much time as they need to grasp the essential parts and relations,
4. Only then do you animate the process, allowing user control over rate and direction if possible.

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Ref: Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning, Richard E. Mayer, ed. Cambridge University Press, p. 457

Learning and the Game Arcade

Games are found in all cultures, even the most "primitive". The need to play (gaming being a rule-driven offshoot, I'd guess) lies very deep in the human code, and the dominant theory seems to be that play is not just what the young ones do the kill time between meals, but an adaptive strategy of evolution.

Play, and the more structured variant that emerged with human's abstractive abilities we call games may help us prepare for life, whether it be stalking prey in the bush or making it in the corporate world. Games are inherently reinforcing, communal, fun, and sometimes even reach over into life-or death consequences for the players. Whatever form they take in a culture, games clearly invoke learning results and are worthy of note for anyone interested in building effective learning devices.

Games, as we know can be addictive too, hence they present a business opportunity.

Games get big audiences on TV, but the actience dimension is where it's at. Electronic gaming is huge, a multi-billion dollar business these days, and in terms of sheer hours of attention paid them, console and online games combined probably already surpass commercial television, if not music and movies as well.

Because of their potential to hold attention, present information and provoke adaptive (winning) responses, over and over again, gaming lies on the frontier of educational and training practice, but the players are mounting up and it's a good part of the border to be policing.

Games seem to fit nicely into the constructivist perspective we have adopted in this blog. They are engineered environments in which the learner makes his choices and responds to the results. Broadly speaking, Seymour Papert's Mindstorms are building games, but any medium that has free parts and carries along a set of connective rules for them qualifies as well.

As I've been browsing the field, I ran across several interesting papers at the Education Arcade (established by leading scholars of digital games and education at MIT funded by the Hewlett Foundation, Microsoft and others) They have developed some intriguing game concepts and pedagogy for math, science and humanities they hope to mix with state-of-the-art game play. Link

The Coded Picture

In the recent book, Codes, editor Paul Lynde describes Victorian artists practice of embedding "problem" narratives into their complex paintings. Clues to this seemingly innocent (at first glance) little scene are found in the glove lying on the floor, the hat on the table (he is a visitor!) and the paradisical exterior, to name a few. All such clues rely on a deep but shared cultural vocabulary of images and symbols, which taken together, describe the situation and comment on it. The fun is in the decoding of course, and sharing a moral point of view.

In film, the "problem" picture is a fully developed trope; i.e. the whodunit. How many thrillers and mysteries have opened with a clue-laden, but unhinted scenario, only later to be fully explicated at the climax of the movie? A shorter, and now widely-seen version of the same idea is the basketball passing clip, which viewed naievely, is a snooze, but on second view surprises (prepared) viewers (spoiler alert) with a perfectly clear walk-through of a man in a gorilla mask. What's impressive is that almost nobody catches the anomalous walker-by on first look, and the lesson is that we see, not necessarily what is there, but what we expect to see there.

This is structurally similar to "Where's Waldo" and those embedded word drawings that used ot be a standby of the old color comics page in the Sunday paper. Looking for hidden clues in a still, as above, or a motion sequence,

From a constructivist perspective, "problem pictures" could be a valuable tool, perhaps in unexplored ways. How much more could be done with short clips, set up with an invitation to "decode" them? What about applying a previously-learned scheme to a real-world scene, then discussing it in small group for a while? Reversing it could also work: where a scene is viewed prior to the presentation of the scheme or theory.

Applied Research: The Worked Example

It is hard to find any empirically tested media tropes, but here is one: the worked-example effect, predicted by cognitive load theory (Sweller, 1988). According to him, this is the best known and most widely studied of the cognitive load effects.
"A worked example is a step-by-step demonstration of how to perform a task or how to solve a problem” (Clark, Nguyen, Sweller, 2006, p. 190). Studying worked examples is an effective instructional strategy to teach complex problem-solving skills (van Merriënboer, 1997). This is because example-based instruction provides expert mental models, to explain the steps of a solution for novices.

Researchers Sweller and Cooper looked first at the teaching of algebra. Early on, they saw that merely showing worked problems was not any better, learning-wise, than merely having students solve problems on their own. With sufficient structuring, however, which reduces cognitive load, the method appeared to work better than unaided solutions.  Importantly, for media designers, they found that (paper) display of both  text and diagrams reduced cogntive load, as we covered in an earlier post (Split-attention effect). Sweller later proposed applications for animation, (closer to home for us).

Not for beginners
The folks this strategy works best for are the more experienced students, and just a little "worked" material seems to be sufficient, follwed by multiple experiences of unaided solving. All of this is related to a more general body of thought, coming out of Dewey, Piaget, Montessori, Vygotsky, and others, called Problem-based learning (PBL) where students collaboratively solve problems and discuss their experiences as they go, or immediately following the exercise.This is not a matter of dumping the non-swimmers into the deep end. PBL assumes some earlier, didactic training in various problem solving strategies and heuristic reasoning first. In this view, the teacher's role quickly shifts however, after providing sufficient theorectical and procedural structure, to that of a facilitator of active collaboration by students facing a challenging, practical problem. The payoff is solving in context, with the complexity of the real-world reflected in the process as well as the outcome.

This techniqie has been applied extensively in professional training for physicians and engineers, and is one I'm entertaining for the training of non-profit professionals in recruiting, fund-raising and enrollment tasks.

Most of the citations I've found are in classroom or lab settings. Applying the technique to video and online will take some imagination. Clearly, the media will have to model a process as well as introduce specific "challenge" materials to be solved.

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Notes on Mutimedia Theory (2)

Here are the constituents of we might call modern multimedia theory, and their founders (... and for which we can thank Richard E. Meyer for lacing together in his wonderful book, Multimedia Theory)

Dual Coding Theory, Pavio
Working Memory, Baddeley
Cogntive Load, Sweller
Generative Theory, Wittrock

For all of these, perhaps the overriding component is this last, the generative notion of the mind (mind defined, for now, as simply as "what the brain does") as an actor, building meanings, testing them against evidence and knitting them into what has already been stored away in long-term memory.

The old model of the brain was a passive one. It fit well into the industrial model of schooling, with boxes and bells and students sorted by age. Sitting in those classrooms, we took in knowledge when it was placed in front of us, and our labor was that of mere retention for regurgitation at testing time. The emphasis was on all the social and spatial arrangements around the student, about teaching and not about learning.

This is important, I think, because we still see that old passive brain model reflected in schooling and in much of "adult education" and industrial training today. "Sit 'n git" still rules in too many places when we really should know better.

An active brain model is better suited to these times when machines are taking over for teachers in much of the non-school teaching establishment (....oh, the machines are coming to the schools alright, but we will probably hold out there for decades.)  The question for MM designers and educational technologists is what ought we be doing with these machines to make the best use of what we now know about human learning?

If the active brain is the foundation, dual coding theory is the first story of the emergent model. There are two channels for us humans; one for processing visual information, the other, auditory. Scholars have gathered a considerable body of knowledge about the interactions of these two channels and the media objects they encounter.

Oddly, a third channel, the haptic/kinesthetic, does not seem to have made much of a stir in mainstream, academic discourse yet, even though a century of experience with Montessori's constructivist ideas seems to be well-supported by findings on the value of movement, physical media, collaboration and discovery, not just for children but life-long learners. The interface and game designers are way ahead of the academicians, though, at least on the haptic dimension. (A good topic for a later inquiry.)

 Working memory and cognitive load are closely interlinked. More on that next time.

Multimedia Theory (1)

There is no grand unified theory for MM yet, but there are some well-accepted sub-theories that seem to hang together pretty well, and which could offer some practical advice for the multimedia designer.

Cognitive Load Theory is one such sub theory, established in the late '90's. Based on the metaphor of a computer's processing limitations as applied to the brain, the theory predicts that when humans are overloaded, their ability to process new information (learn)is impaired. The so-called split-attention effect was cited as evidence for the theory (a decrease in learning efficiency when exhibits carry redundant information). This choking down of our mental processes is more than just a matter of taking in too much information over time, like water slowing as it moves through a narrowed pipe. The brain is not a passive container, but an active processor in learning; we don't learn what we perceive, but what we construct out of what we perceive. This active process of building up new mental models, then relating them to our previous knowledge takes up mental resources. Any redundancy or overloading that inhibits this internalizing process defeats its own educational objectives.

Learning is not a result of being exposed to an exhibit, or simply recalling a memory, it is work, and takes energy and resources. "Exhibit minimalism" is the best practice. Hence, "cogntive load" suggests the following MM rules of thumb:

Don't put animation, narration and text on the screen at the same time. This provides distraction and makes learning harder.

Don't add extraneous visual or auditory details to an explanation. Same as above.

Don't place on screen (or page) text apart from the visuals you are trying to describe. "Working memory" is limited too, so the less one has to carry around the exhibit in recall, the better off they are.

Likewise, don't separate such explanatory items in time.

Applying the Frame Story

According to Wikipedia, the frame story (also frame tale, frame narrative, etc.) ..."employs a narrative technique whereby an introductory main story is composed, at least in part, for the purpose of setting the stage for a fictive narrative or organizing a set of shorter stories, each of which is a story within a story. The frame story leads readers from the first story into the smaller one within it."

This is a trope that can be useful in making an appeal piece (for an Olympic bid, for instance). Each story conveys a moral or principle embedded within a specific narrative. One story tells all, each story supports the others. This approach has variety, simplicity, and memorability going for it.

The ultimate frame story may be Boccacio's "Decameron",  re-mixed a bit by Chaucer in "Canterbury Tales", but there are many modern examples from cinema, such as "New York Stories" (1989), "Thirty-two Short Films about Glen Gould" and Robert Altman's "Short Cuts" (both in 1993). The recent film "Crash" while, like a frame piece has distinctive sub-story arcs and protagonists, so jumbles the orders of presentation and occurrence as to make it another thing altogether (see the article in Wikipedia on Fabula and Sujet for more).

Before we get too academic here, for the story-teller who wants to keep and audience attentive, the frame story lets us make a big one out of lots of little ones. (more to come)

A National Block Party

A really cool multimedia site on this happy day.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/01/18/us/politics/20090119-city-block.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Using FaceBook

How can our non-profit leverage the action in online social media?
As a part of our ongoing effort to keep up with the rapid developments in the digital world, our Management proposes a non-profit site at Facebook. This is just one of a series of ventures that can help build our brand and facilitate member activity at the local level. When added to our web publications and our recently introduced private Social Networking application, we think engagement with a number of publicly accessible social computing applications can advance the Scouting movement.

What is Facebook?
Facebook is a popular, free-access social networking website. It is privately owned and supported by advertising. Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, or any other affinity grouping to connect and interact with other people. Here, they introduce themselves: name, interests, activities, and biographical information. Users can identify others as “friends”, send them messages, and update a personal profile page. The site also allows posting of photos and video and has extensive (if not perfect) privacy features built in.

Why is Facebook important to us?
In a word, it’s huge. It currently boasts 36 million users in the US and a world user base of 136 million, and is rapidly growing. Web page ranking expert Alexia now rates Facebook as the 5th most popular web site in the world. Though the U.S. base is smaller than that of competitor MySpace, Facebook does not permit anonymous postings—one’s corporate or personal identity is central to one’s site. Users can let their profiles be fully public, or they can restrict viewing of their profile data and content to “friends” or users from the same affinity group.

Although usage is spreading into other demographics, Facebook has been most popular among younger adults and teens (the minimum age is 13). Although it can be used in a variety of ways, Facebook typically allows families and friends to maintain awareness and connection with one another when beyond reach physically or by telephone. The potential for use byour adult members and those over 13 could be substantial.

The fact is, we are already there. Our recent search of the site found 482 self-proclaimed members and several groups.

What will our presence on Facebook look like and what can it do?
Facebook has a free program that permits non-profit organizations to present themselves on self-branded sites to proclaim their mission, carry on discussions, and link back to their home websites, just as individual users can. This option has already been adopted by a wide range of organizations to build awareness and engagement with audiences that might not otherwise have located them on the web. Livestrong (cancer survivors) and National Public Radio are just two prominent users. Each tout their mission, invite interested Facebook users to become “friends” and link them over to their respective home sites. We’ve put together an initial presence of our own under the same program. While we won’t be opening the site to discussion, we can offer story content and links over to our public website, but perhaps most importantly, help visitors find others of our membership within the Facebook universe.

How can this help build the brand?
Clearly, a tie into Facebook is a tie into a new universe of users in what is for us a key demographic of youth and young parents, and the “network effect” is increased when we cross connect Facebook users with You Tube, and Twitter, increasing potential referrals to our recruiting sites and www.scouting.org. This more than just tweaking our “image”. Facebook pages allow users to "become a fan" of the individual, product, service, or concept presented. Pages are integrated with Facebook's advertising system, allowing page owners to easily advertise to Facebook's users. Owners can send updates to their fans, which shows up on their news feeds. They also have access to insights and analytics of their fan base. Virtual world activity can result in real-world socializing and results. Witness how the field of political organizing and fund-raising have be revolutionized by online media. Our members can experience the same effect.

Don’t we already have a social networking application?
Our own Social Networking, based on our Community Server license, is very flexible and offers a high level of security for communications among existing members. A Facebook presence does not compete, but complements it. Our own Facebook presence could very well lead members and organization employees to use this service if they wish. We assume however, that for most people, ours is just one of many dimensions of a full life. Most active members have non-member friends, family, and church and school affiliations. They support political parties, join sports teams, give to charities and play many other roles, all of which combine to create a complete social identity. A tool that includes us , but does not exclude these other realms allows them to communicate through a much richer interface. No man is an island, and none of our members can exhaust all of his or her social needs through our program alone.

How can this help our members?
Anything that lets members connect in the virtual world can help them coordinate their actual association activities. Facebook, along with these other burgeoning social applications can help our people connect this experience with the rest of their lives. It can help users share their experiences to others, supporting peer recruiting and peer-based (viral) public relations messaging. It could play a messaging role in local council campaigns, like popcorn sales or capital development, where non-members are involved, and could coordinate district and unit activities.

What’s Next?
We’ve decided to initiate the Facebook presence discreetly at first. Later, a higher-profile blast may be in order. We’ll monitor activity and learn from it. We’ve been studying a number of the more popular social applications to extend the network effect event further. We’ve identified two that we would like to establish presences as we move forward: You Tube (video sharing) and Twitter (micro-blogging and messaging). The web is a dynamic place these days. We’ll do our best to stay on top of it, confident that more opportunities will present themselves over time.

Working with Social Media (1)

As a part of my ongoing study of online social media, I've been looking at YouTube (YT). I think there are some significant opportunities here for my organization (a major not-for-profit) to tap into a burgeoning communications phenomenon and build our brand significantly.

Most of what we see and hear of YT consists of independently uploaded videos from users to the YT home site. This is how hundreds (if not thousands) of organizationally-related pieces have already been posted on the YT site. There are other options for us, however.


1. We can integrate You Tube controls (widgets) into our own site(s) in an embedded player. This would bring some of the brand power of YT to our own advantage, giving visitors a familiar means of searching and playing back video. YT freely distributes the proprietary code (API) to make this possible. We'd use it to add a YT link and button to our public-facing site. This code can be applied to authenticated sites as well--allowing us to YT brand our video on the MyBSA site. In this option, we would upload our own videos to our own YT account. Their API also enables commenting and rating, which would add powerfully to the value of both our authenticated and public sites.

2. We may be able to establish a BSA-branded site under YouTube itself. Here, we could build the BSA brand by exploiting the YT brand even more fully. YT has a program for qualifying non-profits that allows them a self-branded spot on the You Tube Channel. The page would offer full YT functionality and content under our own control. There are additional options: taking donations (through am affordance in the Google API). And of course, offering a place to submit registration inquiries. A fine example of a non-profit adoption of this is the World Bank Channel ( http://www.youtube.com/user/WorldBank). This option needs to be applied for, and we have not done that as yet.

Considerations:
Both of these options allow us to leverage YT and our own sites to cross-plug one another. In the first option, we'd make our site somewhat more "mainstream" looking and functional. In the second, we'd use our YT video description field and branded banner URL to drive users to our public website, and link them back from there to our branded YouTube channel, all the while encouraging users to comment on what they see. All of this content would reside on the YT server.

Even though the YT component is "free", adopting either option will call for more intensive management of our online video assets than we currently afford ourselves. Aside from the work required to build the API into our site design, we'd be entering a post-broadcast use of video in which user feedback is encouraged and reported. We'd need to be very selective about what we post on our behalf, and we'd have to keep it fresh. The good news is that there is a lot of perfectly wholesome video out there, already being posted by our members and friends. Establishment of a YT window for video can help us project a positive image, coming not just from our professional ranks but from members. That’s what “movements” look like.

We have a similar opportunity at Flickr, for still images, and at FaceBook, to extend our reach via a popular online brand. In future papers, I’ll look at opportunities these and related social apps can provide.

An underlying assumption here is that our brand will benefit from collaboration with these widely used sites. Not only do YouTube and FaceBook reach a far broader audience than anything official coming out of our HQ, they tap into a very favorable demographic for recruiting among youth and young families. Appearing here can do a lot to shape our image among heavy online users.

But we will have to do more than just publish here. We’ll need to interact. Aside from an occasional press release our organization has little public voice. The CSE's Blog is the closest we’ve come to an ongoing presentation of ideas and interpretation of events. To date, we’ve chosen to limit this content to an internal professional audience. Why not re-tune the idea and enter into the public space with it? Why not add the occasional editorial from the President, or other prominent internal spokespersont? One concern that will be raised of course is the “ lightning rod” effect. Won’t this expose us to more criticism? Sure it will. But occasional criticism is the price of gaining public attention. We can’t run from that and expect to be considered part of “mainstream” American culture.

The big ideas

Every year, I think it would be a good idea to drag these out and see if they still apply. Then, tell a story abut how each idea has occured in my experience.

The next big deal in cameras?

Canon and Nikon now offer cameras that combine HD Video capture with high-end stills in a 35MM SLR form factor. The Canon EOS 5D MKII and the Nikon D90 cost 2900 and 1000 dollars respectively. More models are sure to come from others as well as the two camera biggies in the next few months.

Could these be the beginning of a new generation of hybrid tools suited to the photojournalistic and documentary missions? It's hard not to overstate the promise here: a tool that costs under a grand (the Nikon, anyway) but offers production values unheard of at over twenty times that price just a few years ago.

The first widely-seen work on this new device is a thrill to look at:

http://vincentlaforet.smugmug.com/gallery/6042742_wZKiA#377930419_dgxvY-A-LB

The audio capability is very limited on the Nikon camera, but better with the Canon. There's a rudimentary on-body mic on the former, but no provision for external input from your higher-end audio gear, forcing one to use a dual system record setup for now. That's gonna change.

I know my "tipping point" to a purchase: the next Nikon DSLR +HD Cam that comes along with pro audio hookups and >30minute clip limit.

The question is, who will use these and how?

Thoughts on leaving "management"

Well, it's time for me to leave this job and pick up another. I'll be an "individual contributor" for a while, maybe for good. I will miss the people on my team. I will wonder how they will do under new leadership. I will wonder what we have each learned from one another during mine.

It took me a long time, but I think have finally learned something about leadership and teamwork.
Leadership is what it takes to produce teamwork. Teamwork is essential to real productivity. So how do you succeed at being a manager of people?

I've given this a lot of thought over 18 years of people-management. I've finally learned that you don't "manage" people, in any direct sense and you certainly do not create a team by issuing instructions. Many factors go into the "team" behavior of a given group: setting, history, individual drive and capability, external challenges, and sheer accident: they all come down to something very simple: trust.

You do that by working with yourself first. The burden of proof will always work against you.

Behavior trumps claims. You cannot merely ask to be trusted. You must act so that others learn you can be trusted.

Paradoxically, you have to place trust others, even when you have insufficient evidence to do so.

When you let others down, expect to work a good while to re-gain their trust. When people let you down, you have to give them the benefit of the doubt.

As the leader, you create the atmosphere for trust to be learned. Eventually, most people will live up to your example.

No matter what you do, not everyone will strive to be trust-able to the rest of the team. The hardest part of being a manager is to know when it's time to take a person off the team. When that determination is made, it's essential to act decisively.

This simple but nearly useless bit of wisdom is all I can manage.

Appreciating Obama's Speech Style

We've got a new super-communicator on the political scene. Like him or not (I do), Barack Obama and his cadre of young speechwriters are treating us to some of the finest examples of oratory we've seen in years. So, as a communications buff, I'd like to reflect a bit on the Obama style. Below is the full text of his June 4th speech:

Tonight, after fifty-four hard-fought contests, our primary season has finally come to an end.

Sixteen months have passed since we first stood together on the steps of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois. Thousands of miles have been traveled. Millions of voices have been heard. And because of what you said – because you decided that change must come to Washington; because you believed that this year must be different than all the rest; because you chose to listen not to your doubts or your fears but to your greatest hopes and highest aspirations, tonight we mark the end of one historic journey with the beginning of another – a journey that will bring a new and better day to America. Tonight, I can stand before you and say that I will be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States.

Note the hallmarks of this style:
repetition, parallel construction
at the phrase and sentence level
(in classical rhetoric, "Anaphora") and alliteration.

A "journey" figure is established
placing the candidate in history.

I want to thank every American who stood with us over the course of this campaign – through the good days and the bad; from the snows of Cedar Rapids to the sunshine of Sioux Falls. And tonight I also want to thank the men and woman who took this journey with me as fellow candidates for President.

Alliteration again in the "s" consonants
and a vivid image suggesting seasonal change.
The "journey" figure is restated,
now referring to his fellow candidates.

At this defining moment for our nation, we should be proud that our party put forth one of the most talented, qualified field of individuals ever to run for this office. I have not just competed with them as rivals, I have learned from them as friends, as public servants, and as patriots who love America and are willing to work tirelessly to make this country better. They are leaders of this party, and leaders that America will turn to for years to come.

He praises his competitors, an act of humility.

That is particularly true for the candidate who has traveled further on this journey than anyone else. Senator Hillary Clinton has made history in this campaign not just because she’s a woman who has done what no woman has done before, but because she’s a leader who inspires millions of Americans with her strength, her courage, and her commitment to the causes that brought us here tonight.

"Journey" and "history" are repeated, reinforcing
the importance of all of these events.
He's building a context for something
even more portentious.

We’ve certainly had our differences over the last sixteen months. But as someone who’s shared a stage with her many times, I can tell you that what gets Hillary Clinton up in the morning – even in the face of tough odds – is exactly what sent her and Bill Clinton to sign up for their first campaign in Texas all those years ago; what sent her to work at the Children’s Defense Fund and made her fight for health care as First Lady; what led her to the United States Senate and fueled her barrier-breaking campaign for the presidency – an unyielding desire to improve the lives of ordinary Americans, no matter how difficult the fight may be. And you can rest assured that when we finally win the battle for universal health care in this country, she will be central to that victory. When we transform our energy policy and lift our children out of poverty, it will be because she worked to help make it happen. Our party and our country are better off because of her, and I am a better candidate for having had the honor to compete with Hillary Rodham Clinton.

There are those who say that this primary has somehow left us weaker and more divided. Well I say that because of this primary, there are millions of Americans who have cast their ballot for the very first time. There are Independents and Republicans who understand that this election isn’t just about the party in charge of Washington, it’s about the need to change Washington. There are young people, and African-Americans, and Latinos, and women of all ages who have voted in numbers that have broken records and inspired a nation.

All of you chose to support a candidate you believe in deeply. But at the end of the day, we aren’t the reason you came out and waited in lines that stretched block after block to make your voice heard. You didn’t do that because of me or Senator Clinton or anyone else. You did it because you know in your hearts that at this moment – a moment that will define a generation – we cannot afford to keep doing what we’ve been doing. We owe our children a better future. We owe our country a better future. And for all those who dream of that future tonight, I say – let us begin the work together. Let us unite in common effort to chart a new course for America.

In just a few short months, the Republican Party will arrive in St. Paul with a very different agenda. They will come here to nominate John McCain, a man who has served this country heroically. I honor that service, and I respect his many accomplishments, even if he chooses to deny mine. My differences with him are not personal; they are with the policies he has proposed in this campaign.

Because while John McCain can legitimately tout moments of independence from his party in the past, such independence has not been the hallmark of his presidential campaign.

It’s not change when John McCain decided to stand with George Bush ninety-five percent of the time, as he did in the Senate last year.

It’s not change when he offers four more years of Bush economic policies that have failed to create well-paying jobs, or insure our workers, or help Americans afford the skyrocketing cost of college – policies that have lowered the real incomes of the average American family, widened the gap between Wall Street and Main Street, and left our children with a mountain of debt.

And it’s not change when he promises to continue a policy in Iraq that asks everything of our brave men and women in uniform and nothing of Iraqi politicians – a policy where all we look for are reasons to stay in Iraq, while we spend billions of dollars a month on a war that isn’t making the American people any safer.

So I’ll say this – there are many words to describe John McCain’s attempt to pass off his embrace of George Bush’s policies as bipartisan and new. But change is not one of them.

Change is a foreign policy that doesn’t begin and end with a war that should’ve never been authorized and never been waged. I won’t stand here and pretend that there are many good options left in Iraq, but what’s not an option is leaving our troops in that country for the next hundred years – especially at a time when our military is overstretched, our nation is isolated, and nearly every other threat to America is being ignored.

We must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in - but start leaving we must. It’s time for Iraqis to take responsibility for their future. It’s time to rebuild our military and give our veterans the care they need and the benefits they deserve when they come home. It’s time to refocus our efforts on al Qaeda’s leadership and Afghanistan, and rally the world against the common threats of the 21st century – terrorism and nuclear weapons; climate change and poverty; genocide and disease. That’s what change is.

Change is realizing that meeting today’s threats requires not just our firepower, but the power of our diplomacy – tough, direct diplomacy where the President of the United States isn’t afraid to let any petty dictator know where America stands and what we stand for. We must once again have the courage and conviction to lead the free world. That is the legacy of Roosevelt, and Truman, and Kennedy. That’s what the American people want. That’s what change is.

Change is building an economy that rewards not just wealth, but the work and workers who created it. It’s understanding that the struggles facing working families can’t be solved by spending billions of dollars on more tax breaks for big corporations and wealthy CEOs, but by giving a the middle-class a tax break, and investing in our crumbling infrastructure, and transforming how we use energy, and improving our schools, and renewing our commitment to science and innovation. It’s understanding that fiscal responsibility and shared prosperity can go hand-in-hand, as they did when Bill Clinton was President.

John McCain has spent a lot of time talking about trips to Iraq in the last few weeks, but maybe if he spent some time taking trips to the cities and towns that have been hardest hit by this economy – cities in Michigan, and Ohio, and right here in Minnesota – he’d understand the kind of change that people are looking for.

Maybe if he went to Iowa and met the student who works the night shift after a full day of class and still can’t pay the medical bills for a sister who’s ill, he’d understand that she can’t afford four more years of a health care plan that only takes care of the healthy and wealthy. She needs us to pass health care plan that guarantees insurance to every American who wants it and brings down premiums for every family who needs it. That’s the change we need.

Maybe if he went to Pennsylvania and met the man who lost his job but can’t even afford the gas to drive around and look for a new one, he’d understand that we can’t afford four more years of our addiction to oil from dictators. That man needs us to pass an energy policy that works with automakers to raise fuel standards, and makes corporations pay for their pollution, and oil companies invest their record profits in a clean energy future – an energy policy that will create millions of new jobs that pay well and can’t be outsourced. That’s the change we need.

And maybe if he spent some time in the schools of South Carolina or St. Paul or where he spoke tonight in New Orleans, he’d understand that we can’t afford to leave the money behind for No Child Left Behind; that we owe it to our children to invest in early childhood education; to recruit an army of new teachers and give them better pay and more support; to finally decide that in this global economy, the chance to get a college education should not be a privilege for the wealthy few, but the birthright of every American. That’s the change we need in America. That’s why I’m running for President.

The other side will come here in September and offer a very different set of policies and positions, and that is a debate I look forward to. It is a debate the American people deserve. But what you don’t deserve is another election that’s governed by fear, and innuendo, and division. What you won’t hear from this campaign or this party is the kind of politics that uses religion as a wedge, and patriotism as a bludgeon – that sees our opponents not as competitors to challenge, but enemies to demonize. Because we may call ourselves Democrats and Republicans, but we are Americans first. We are always Americans first.

Despite what the good Senator from Arizona said tonight, I have seen people of differing views and opinions find common cause many times during my two decades in public life, and I have brought many together myself. I’ve walked arm-in-arm with community leaders on the South Side of Chicago and watched tensions fade as black, white, and Latino fought together for good jobs and good schools. I’ve sat across the table from law enforcement and civil rights advocates to reform a criminal justice system that sent thirteen innocent people to death row. And I’ve worked with friends in the other party to provide more children with health insurance and more working families with a tax break; to curb the spread of nuclear weapons and ensure that the American people know where their tax dollars are being spent; and to reduce the influence of lobbyists who have all too often set the agenda in Washington.

In our country, I have found that this cooperation happens not because we agree on everything, but because behind all the labels and false divisions and categories that define us; beyond all the petty bickering and point-scoring in Washington, Americans are a decent, generous, compassionate people, united by common challenges and common hopes. And every so often, there are moments which call on that fundamental goodness to make this country great again.

So it was for that band of patriots who declared in a Philadelphia hall the formation of a more perfect union; and for all those who gave on the fields of Gettysburg and Antietam their last full measure of devotion to save that same union.

So it was for the Greatest Generation that conquered fear itself, and liberated a continent from tyranny, and made this country home to untold opportunity and prosperity.

So it was for the workers who stood out on the picket lines; the women who shattered glass ceilings; the children who braved a Selma bridge for freedom’s cause.

So it has been for every generation that faced down the greatest challenges and the most improbable odds to leave their children a world that’s better, and kinder, and more just.

And so it must be for us.

America, this is our moment. This is our time. Our time to turn the page on the policies of the past. Our time to bring new energy and new ideas to the challenges we face. Our time to offer a new direction for the country we love.

The journey will be difficult. The road will be long. I face this challenge with profound humility, and knowledge of my own limitations. But I also face it with limitless faith in the capacity of the American people. Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth. This was the moment – this was the time – when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves, and our highest ideals. Thank you, God Bless you, and may God Bless the United States of America.

Audience to Actience (2)

(Today;'s NYT heralds another wrinkle in the emergence of actiences: the Wii exercise machine:)

"Women, parents, even nursing-home residents have been drawn to the Wii’s simple evocations of games such as tennis and bowling. The Wii has become the best-selling game machine of the current generation, selling more than 25 million worldwide, and remains scarce on store shelves across the nation.

Now Nintendo’s latest brainchild, Wii Fit, could send similar ripples through the home-fitness market. Scheduled to be released in North America next week, Wii Fit is not meant to replace a gym. But in a world of $3,000 elliptical machines and $150-an-hour personal trainers, it has at least a chance of becoming a global, affordable, mass-market interactive home-fitness system. (On its overseas debut last month, it became one of the fastest-selling games ever in Britain.)

Exercising with Wii Fit is like having a Bob Harper or a Denise Austin who talks back — gently cajoling you through exercises, praising, nudging, even reminding you to eat a banana once in a while. It also lets you see how you stack up against friends or family members; each user creates a cartoony avatar called a “Mii.”

Audiences to actiences

I’ve been thinking a lot about audiences lately. We've all tended to think of audiences as passive, enthralled by us, totally attending to our presentation. But this old engraving suggests a more knowing reality.

Our audiences may be present, sitting politely in their chairs, but who knows what they are thinking? The artist seems to say, "Yes, there are some enjoying the show, but there are other things that may be more immediate and interesting to the audience, like each other.”

They aren't really an audience if they aren't listening. So you really haven't counted what “counts” if you count the bodies or the "eyeballs" in the online world.

Suppose I get up and speak for 5 minutes. If there are 100 people in the room, more or less listening to me, I figure I'll get 500 minutes of net attention. That’s just about 8 hours. Not bad for one ordinary person.

But the big audiences have changed. In 1956, when we had just 3 national television channels, 81% of all American TV sets were tuned in to see the “Lucy Goes to the Hospital”episode. Multiplying that audience by the 30 minutes it was on the air, I figure Lucy got 22 million hours of net attention. Makes my 8 hours look pretty pathetic.

The fact is of course that the share of audience was much better (when there were three major networks and no cable ) than anybody gets these days. Those were the glory days of audiences.
But audiences are getting harder to come by. Attention is now scarce too. Both attention and audience are getting expensive, and choosy.

In 2008 for instance, a long-haired fellow of modest talents, a Mr. Jason Castro, appears on American Idol for weekly appearances over a few months. Multiply the show's rated audience of 27 million and, giving Jason say, four minutes of airtime, he gets 18million hours of attention. Almost as much as Lucy, albeit with a much smaller share (31% of television homes) of a much bigger pie. Not incidentally, Jason is there because this audience votes on the continued presence of the would-be "idols".

A voting audience has more skin in the game, no?

Niko Bellic is the antihero of Grand Theft Auto IV. This new video game is selling like crazy. Industry watchers predict that GTA IV could sell over 12 million units in its first year. This is a game of course, not a linear presentation, although it looks more like a realistically animated movie thn a game. The producers claim that there is 60 hours of total story arc to be explored within the numerous choice points embedded in the action.

Now we have to re-appraise our net attention measure. Multiplying the expected sales of 12 million units times 60 hours nets a whopping 460 million hours of attention--beating Lucy and the American Idols by an order of magnitude. GTA users say that this interactive experience is "compelling" and "addictive". You really can’t call these users an "audience" in the old-fashioned passive sense.

The users of such multimedia entertainments are now making hundreds of choices, driving the action forward. They have become actors (in the broadest sense of the word). And here's a final HUGE point: Unlike TV or movies, (and more like books) nothing happens unless the users are attending and acting.

Attention is the game. How do contemporary media get it?
Next time you pass through an airport, stop at the magazine rack. The eye-stopping images appeal to our basic drives: food, sex and shelter. No changes in subject matter from month to month, just the images. This may grab us but holding attention takes a bit more work.

Just as we are hardwired to look at nubile human beings, our attention is drawn to what’s shiny and moves (reptilian brain). What psychologists call the “orienting reflex” draws our attention to movement in our visual field. We evolved this way so we could see our dinner before it saw us. Even six-month old babies will sit and stare at a televison.

It’s hard for any adult NOT to watch a car chase. But movement alone only goes so far. We get drawn into the magazines (or movies, or TV shows) with STORY. Lucy, GTA IV and even untalented Jason all hook us with STORY. The next step up in the media battle for our minds is to draw us into the ACTION. Idol does a this with audience voting; onlime media get us clicking, putting us into action even more immediately.

Play is the next level of involvement. GTA does it by letting us cheat, steal and bang away at the characters. We have a growing “playdience” of those who game online and on computers. The numbers for gaming are staggering. Over the course of the first quarter, total hardware sales absolutely ballooned 94 percent to $1.3 billion, with console hardware again comprising most of that total—$958 million (a 129 percent increase).

They say that GTA is a rush. I’m not so sure that’s a good thing, but it may tell us something about the future of media. Maybe the old notion of audience needs to be replaced with what you might call a growing actience.

You coud define actience as any group of media users who, simultaneously or independently, attend to and actively engage in a media object, changing it's eventual performance. Those media objects that enable actiences have mechansims that enable play, choice, design, or other elicted behavior whic arise from outside the media object itself. More straightforwardly: an actience exerts control of the presentation in some way.

To the extent that the online users of today are shopping, buying, donating to candidates and causes, mapping, designing, commenting, arguing, and voting they are actiences. They are also blogging or, shooting their own video and photos, and in many cases are creating their own applications.

For those of us who consider ourselves communicators, we need to leave "audiences" behind and create actiences. (more to come)

Augmented Reality

A notable development involves three technologies; a spatially-referenced database, GPS, and position-sensitive head-mounted display to superimpose mediated content over the visual field. Thus, an installer at Boeing follows the prescribed wiring diagram projected over the interior fuselage of a 777, a student at Columbia University sees long-since demolished buildings along with texts for a historically-enriched walk about the campus, and computer games can be projected and played beyond the screen, across the neighborhood. The military is working on AR applications to the battlespace, allowing soldiers to "see" through walls and underground.

In an early post here, we looked at the potential of the computer to let us experience the world as text. We may soon get locationally-driven messages in the form of advertisements that link our interests to the proximity of resources and services. Just as the audio guides we mentioned earlier can enrich our walk through an historic neighborhood, we may be headed to a whole new level of interpreted experience as media tied to space and our view of it changes.

The modern city already is a text. It wears the intentional commentary of its inhabitants; in signs, advertising, and graffiti, just as it wears the unintentional signs of use, wear, and movement. The rise of AR may allow us to become new flaneurs, taking in a world where unlimited annotation is visible in the moment.

http://www.temple.edu/ispr/examples/ex03_01_20a.html

The Engine of Story

What is a story?

We begin with a fact, an event:
1. A woman died.

This is not a story. To have a story we must have at least a second event.
2. A woman died. Her husband died soon after.

This is starting to sound like a story. But we still need a definite link, a causal connection between the two events:

3. A woman died. Her husband died of grief soon after.

That is a story. Something happened, to someone or something, or someone or something took an action as a result. The addition of the explanation “died of grief” is what does the trick. From there on, it’s just embellishment. For example:

4. A beautiful young woman died suddenly of a strange illness. Her lover,mad with grief, took his own life soon after.

That still may fall short of the classical ideal of story. Aristotle would have said that we may have a beginning and an end, but we still need a “middle” for our story. He would have liked to see a bit more struggle-- a third element that charges the causal link with a bit of suspense. In a word: drama. We might amend our simple story this way:

5. A beautiful young woman died suddenly of a strange illness. Her lover collapsed into grief and considered suicide. In a profound dream, the woman appeared to him and begged him to go on living for them both, assuring him that in the hereafter they would be reunited. When he woke, the young man realized his loss and was sad again. Yet, as he went about his day, he was repeatedly reminded of the girl in the dream and of her admonition. He began to see the world in a new light, filled with possibility. He decided to enter medical school, to learn to eradicate the very disease that took his lover from him.

That may seem a bit hokey to some, but in the hands of a good presenter it could make a powerful impression. The middle of the story is any element that throws the outcome, at least for a while, up for grabs. There are endless other possible outcomes to our little story stem, where the initiating event (her death) is responded to with a man possessing a different kind of character and might lead to a different outcome. The middle of any story is a free space for action driven by the first fact, and which lead to a plausible conclusion.

So that is story: a generative event, followed by one or more actions selected by a character, which lead inevitably to a concluding event.

This approach to story is based on structure.

Can a perfectly good story be laid out like a child’s castle of building blocks, later to be decorated and extended over a movie- or novel-length arc? Or is there some mysterious process in which a premise need only be imagined for a given character, and then allowed to spin itself out, almost of its own design, onto the page? Clearly it is easier to explain story analytically, and easier for the novice storyteller to apply it according to a classic pattern. The experienced or more gifted storyteller may rely on his subconscious to follow the same underlying rules.

It may be that both obtain; that a universal structure will always appear under analysis of any good story, whether the process of creation was a deliberate or spontaneous one.

What constitutes drama?

So much for story. Is that synonymous with drama? Drama is a kind of story that has a compelling quality, a story which, once we are engaged in it, it is impossible to not want to learn the outcome. For a story to be dramatic, it most be based, according to Aristotle, on conflict. For Lajos Egri, it must be based on a premise, a fundamental argument that lies behind the story and for which the story is an execution. A premise contains an event or driving fact just as a story does. But depends equally on another component, that of character.

Let's go back to our discussuon of the root story above. In my trite little story line, I implied, but did not fully explicate the character of the man, the lover who became despondent. What might have been premise that lay there in story version 2 ?

A beautiful young woman died suddenly of a strange illness. Her lover,mad with grief, took his own life soon after.

The premise is that the nature of their love was exclusive and that for him anyway, life without her would not be worth living. When she dies, the premise is tested. So too is the young man's character. The dramatic quality comes when we are caused to wonder what the young man will do. A conflict is set up within him; "must I end life or grasp it?". To the extent we can identify with the character, we will sufffer in suspense until he makes his decision.

The little play we began to develop with few linked events here finally enters the realm of drama. In addition to the raw elements of story, there is a moral quality that arises in the actions of characters confronting events. The premise is like an engine, working deep under the story arc. If the premise is a sound one, it can be drawn out for play or film of great length and complexity.

For Egri, as for Aristotle, there is a determinism underneath even the most suspenseful story. The outcome must be implied in the premise established in the beginning. In Aristotle's day, when plays were a religious rite, it was the will of the gods, carried out by the Fates, that determined the ending of ther play. In modern drama, we are most satisfied when the character's vices or virtues play themselves out in the struggle, and yet prevail.

The audience's satisfaction with a story can be attributed to many factors; performance, detail, atmosphere, even "effects". But without the fundamentals of story (linked events) stacked upon the driving element of premise (character in conflict) you won't raise the emotional response required to bring them inside the story, making it their own.

A Different Kind of Road Movie

I know one man filled with stories. He's my cab driver, the same guy we've called now for years to pick us up and take us to the airport for business trips and vacations. We use him exclusively (let's call him Cyrus) because he's reliable, polite, and a great conversationalist. Cyrus is from Iran, or "Persia" as he prefers to call his homeland. He's Azeri, a proud northerner, and takes a secularist point of view in describing his old home. He's well-informed in political affairs in general and we have a great time smashing the current administration's dreadful campaign in Cyrus' part of the world.

I may go for months without seeing him, but whenever I find myself back in his cab, we return to our discussion, picking up much the same subject matter, adding what's new or just re-entering his past for another story. Over time, I have acquired a layered, nuanced experience of this man's life. The cab rides become not so much a series of discrete events as a room to be entered, a study for thought and reflection: "We're back in the cab now, time to go to Persia."

Cyrus, like any of the many foreign born cabbies in our town, would be a great subject for a documentary. I'd break away from the conceit of HBO's Taxi Stories, that focus on the eccentric passengers, and find a way to string together a series of stories told by the driver. The cabbies' tale might be a new take on the "road movie", one where a continuity of narrative replaces a physical destination. The line of retelling, the recalled event, is laid out across the driver's perpetual looping through the city. Real time would be cut up and rearranged to suit the story line.

How could this develop from here? How would one make it artful and entertaining? How much can we get from the cab-as-camera obscura? Would we focus on one or more of Cyrus's tales, or string a series of cabbie philosophers together, flying in some kind of parallel formation? Do we have any hope of a dramatic structure? Or will this be more like Calvino's Invisible Cities, a spiralling and open-ended series of riffs on a theme?