Video is everywhere these days … it’s more and more ubiquitous. Often I’ll see an interesting Twitter tweet or other storytelling reference that when I click on it, turns out to be a video.

Nothing wrong with that except that I have zero patience and often am too restless to sit through a video.

Back in the spring, my friend, video storyteller Thomas Clifford wrote a blog entry, “Is This The Future Of Video Storytelling For Organizations?” He was talking about a particular video series on the online Washington Post site, On Being, “video portraits that take you into the musings, passions and quirks of all sorts of people,” but perhaps Clifford’s characterization of these short videos should be used as criteria to evaluate any piece of video that claims to be storytelling:

• Compelling
• Inspiring
• Radically simple

Clifford then asks these questions:

• Can organizations use video narratives as a way to learn from one another?
• Are video narratives an effective way to genuinely engage employees and its customers?
• In a time of information saturation, should organizations integrate narratives into their communications efforts? If so, how?
• Can our individual stories be part of a larger brand’s story?

All great questions that I would like to apply in a broader way to the videos I’m listing here. I’ll return to those presently.

A bit earlier than Clifford’s post, Amanda Hirsch quoted Tom Kennedy from 2002 (who built the award-winning multimedia unit at Washingtonpost.com): “I believe we’re just beginning to scratch the surface of the Web ‘s potential as a story-telling device.” Hirsch’s followup: “Seven years later, I believe we’re still just scratching the surface.”

So, as you review the videos listed here, ask yourself if they demonstrate we are still just scratching the surface in Web-based storytelling, or have we gone beyond? Do these videos pass Clifford’s test of compelling, inspiring, and radically simple? And, now returning to a broader view of Clifford’s questions:

• Can people use video narratives as a way to learn from one another?
• Are video narratives an effective way to genuinely engage Web users?
• In a time of information saturation, should organizations, individuals, and brands integrate narratives into their communications efforts? If so, how?
• Can our individual stories be part of a larger brand’s story, the larger human story, the online content story?

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, do these videos indeed represent storytelling?

• In Passion for the Land, Ranchers and Cooperative Extension agents partner with media artists and UC-Davis university scholars to produce and present digital stories on current challenges to agricultural viability and rural community life in the Sierra Valley. The one I watched, “Is Sustainable Attainable?” was well-done and definitely a story, although I thought the narrator/protagonist was a bit sing-songy in his delivery.
• Ohio State University has developed a reputation as a hub for digital storytelling, and among its impressive set of resources, OSU’s Web site has a section that describes the OSU Digital Storytelling Program’s mission this way: “to help the academic community communicate their passion for teaching, research, and outreach through personal, engaging storytelling.” A collection of “Academic Story Examples” is offered here. I enjoyed The Human Connection. The site also offers a nice set of resources.
• My Facebook friend, Evelyn Van Tyl, who is also connected with Ohio State — she’s an academic and career coach there — just today sent me the video, “Happiness” (embedded at the bottom of this post), the story of her personal journey to discover that “happiness is created in the daily practice of choosing to see the positive.”
• The storytelling philosophy of MediaStorm, writes Carrie Brown-Smith at The Changing Newsroom (quoting MediaStorm’s Brian Storm), “is to let the subjects speak in their own words. They use on-screen text to connect the dots and drive the narrative, but the audio is in their sources’ own words. They combine stills and video to great effect and always incorporate some kind of surprise for the audience.” This is pretty close to the style Clifford spoke of with the Washington Post’s On Being series. Defying my personal impatience with watching videos online, Brown-Smith reports that on MediaStorm, 65 percent of those that start watching stick with the site’s 21-minute videos to the end. In explaining why, Brown-Smith perhaps adds three more criteria to what we should be looking for in online storytelling: high quality, easily shareable on social media, and defiant of audience expectations for short-attention-span stuff. I watched Intended Consequences (pictured), about sexual violence during the Rwandan genocide, which was actually just under 15 minutes. I was not impatient.
• Also rather long (just over 9 minutes) but absolutely stunning is a piece excepted from the TV show “Ukraine’s Got Talent.” Highly touted in the Twitterverse, the video features the show’s winner, Kseniya Simonova, creating a jaw-dropping sand animation that clearly makes a huge emotional impact of every member of the audience. As you watch the video, you can tell the artist is depicting wartime, but the reason for the audience’s outpouring of emotion is unclear until you learn the background, as I did on Associated Content. It is:

• The Great Patriotic War, or as we call it in America, WWII. Ukraine was probably the area most devastated in the war, even more than Germany. It was a conflict that saw nearly one in four Ukrainians killed. A population of almost 42 million lost between 8 and 11 million people, depending on which estimate one references. Ukraine represented almost 20 percent of all the causalities suffered during WWII. And that was after Stalin had killed millions during the manufactured famines before the war. It to this day touches every Ukrainian.

• Three entertaining and sometimes touching videos are commercials (all re-tweeted many times on Twitter): “Prized Possession” equating home insurance with “a worried dog search[ing] for and ultimately find[ing] the smartest way to protect his most prized-possession;” [Levi’s] “Watch pocket created 1873 … and abused ever since” in which a young man uses his jeans’ watch pocket to stow a condom; and Olympus [Camera]: The PEN Story, “A 50-year journey in stop-motion.”

• In a bit of a different vein is “The Terrible Thing of Alpha-9!”, which is animated. Even though the main character is not human, the story told is very human and tragic.
• Finally, a collection of videos for a good cause: the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) presents Stories from the Field: A Multimedia Collection of Stories from All Over the World (I didn’t have the right plug-in to watch these).

All the videos I saw passed Clifford’s basic tests of compelling, inspiring, and radically simple (some were more compelling than others, and some may not have been quite “radically” simple).

I’m not video-savvy enough to answer whether these demonstrate whether we are still just scratching the surface in Web-based storytelling, or whether we’ve broken new ground.
What do you think? What’s lacking in video storytelling? What’s the next step?

My 22-year-old son works as a produce specialist in a health-food store and has become quite an evangelist for natural foods. He has been campaigning to change his parents’ eating habits and urged me to read The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan.

So I’ve been reading it — or rather listening to the audiobook because I’m a super-slow reader, and listening to audiobooks is a productive thing to do as I work on outdoor chores on our Washington land.

Pollan talks about “storied food,” food presented in natural-foods stores with brochures about how the beef cattle “living in beautiful places” ranging from “plant-diverse high-mountain meadows to miles of Aspen groves and think sagebrush flats.” He notes that he, like many consumers are inclined to pay higher prices for such meat. Not only only do we perceive that the meat tastes better, but we also love a good story.

The chapter from which those quotes come from is full of discussion and examples of storied food.

But previous chapters told a grim story of factory farms, a narrative that would never be told at a natural-food store or any other retailer. This is the story of cattle crammed into feedlots, mired in manure lagoons, cattle that are fed a mush of corn (which they were never meant to eat), supplements, chemicals, and antibiotics (in part because their unnatural corn diet renders them susceptible to disease).

I don’t eat a lot of red meat, but we do have a weekly tradition of a steak cooked on the grill. It’s yummy, and I look forward to it. Hearing the story of the factory farms does indeed have me seriously questioning this habit. Of course, I tell myself that my boycotting factory-farmed beef will do nothing to stop the practice.

But then I think of “storied food” that is close to home. A few miles from our home here is a farm with a couple of horses and the most fabulous specimen of bovine you’ve ever laid eyes on. We just call him Bovine because we were unsure of his gender at first. Pretty sure Bovine’s not a girl cow — no udder. And probably not a bull because — ahem — something seems to be missing down there. So he’s probably a steer.

We feed him apples, which he absolutely loves and gobbles up. And I worry about him. Is he destined to be steak dinner? Is he the family pet? Is he a child’s 4H project (which doesn’t mean he still couldn’t be steak dinner)? I’ve noticed steer manure is popular here; maybe his function is to produce manure.

As I think about changing my eating habits away from factory-farmed beef, I think of our Bovine, the protagonist of a potential food story. It would still be tragic for me — or anyone — to eat our magnificent Bovine. But if someone does, they could at least take comfort that he had a happy grass-fed and apple-chomping life while he was here — not a miserable life of suffering that the factory-farmed cattle lead.

I mean, just look at him … the hero of a pastoral story of the vanishing small American family farm (his farm is for sale, by the way).

Read more of Pollan’s discussion of “storied foods” here.

To what extent are you influenced by “storied food?”

I’ve just read a fascinating publication from Microsoft titled “Interoperability: Improving Education” which came about as a result of 10 or so educators and ICT practitioners who were brought together by Microsoft for a meeting running alongside the annual NAACE conference held in Blackpool, England, earlier this year. The brief was to talk about the way that schools use pupil data. And the wisdoms that ensued are contained in an new Microsoft discussion document for school leaders and local authorities, “Interoperability: Improving schools” (download the PDF here).

The contents of this paper provide timely insights for NZ educators because it nicely ties together two pieces of work that are currently the focus of the Ministry of Education. First are the discussions about standardised testing, and the measurement of student progress and achievement, and second are the issues of interoperability as they relate to work being done around data interoperbility between LMSs and SMSs in schools, and the whole area of e-portfolios.

From its title, and the fact that it’s published by a technology company, you could be forgiven for thinking that the document is about a technology solution that will end all our woes. This is not the case. Instead, the document contains a summary of thoughts in response to questions such as:

• are we collecting the right data?
• what data should we be collecting?
• who needs, or wishes to see the data?
• can we easily move data to where it’s wanted or needed?

The context for the discussion is identified in this excerpt from the introduction:

The last five years has been dominated by discussions about common file formats, and competing systems which support data interchange standards. The International Standards community, through its work on file standards, has helped us reach a situation where students and teachers can easily share assignments, examination submissions and documents.

The same cannot be said for simple data interchange – for example, the simple requirement to automate the process of keeping a list of users up to date within a learning platform without a manual intervention. And those solutions which do exist for this appear to need customisation for each data relationship – between different learning platforms for example.

I believe that we are collecting the data within our educational systems that we need to deliver
improvement, but only those data items that are being seen as “part of the system”. We collect a core of formal learning data in our schools Management Information Systems, and through other systems we collect further datapoints – often disconnected from the core learning data – on health, achievement and engagement.

In the 21st Century, we are seeing a huge growth in learning and engagement outside of the formal education system. As we continue to build extensive connected learning communities, we need to find ways to see the holistic story of a truly connected learner, including their learning in school, in the community and individually. We need to move from a top-down data culture (ie we measure what the managers above us want measured) to an individually driven data culture, where the individual has more input to the data that tells their individual story, and where their past learning journey is used to support their future learning journey.

To achieve this we need to think outside of the strict confines of top-down, organisational data collection. We need to ask questions from a different perspective “How can students self-asses their skills and use that to improve their learning?” and “If we asked a student to tell us how they are doing at school, what data would they share with us?”

I am currently enjoying being a part of separate discussions (online and offline) around each of the issues identified above – but perhaps there’s good cause to reflect here and think about how timely it might be to work like this think tank, and engage in some robust discussions that actually  link both parts of the equation?

Perhaps it would allow us to reach similar conclusions as the English did as a basis for moving forward:

The answer, as it emerged in discussion, is that there‟s arguably too much emphasis on one kind of data. The current pattern of top-down accountability, it‟s suggested creates an emphasis on classroom attainment at the expense of skills and competencies. Or, as Sir Mark Grundy puts it,  “We’re measuring the wrong things.”

We received about 20 entries in the Gadget Club contest so far – not a huge number but impressive enough to offer some hearty competition. So I present to you, dear readers, the first five contestants in our Gadget Club contest. It was hard to pick just five and the remaining entrants will go back into the pool next week.

Please go through each one and assess it for value, salability, and funitude.

Remember: the contest is running for two more weeks and any entrants not chosen here will be added to the pool next week. Head over to the main post to read the full rules and conditions and good luck!

I’ll count the votes this Friday at noon Eastern.

UPDATE – I just reset the poll. ProProfs has a method to watch the IPs and we had a bit of a run on the PSI gadget. Please avoid this in the future. I’m not your Dad.

Long after the Palm Pre hype machine has been turned off, Sprint is just now making the Pre available for purchase via Sprint.com. There really isn’t advantage of ordering the phone online besides you don’t actually have to leave the comforts of your basement. Purchasers will still need to mail in a $100 rebate to bring the cost down to $199. But if avoiding the general public is your thing, it’s time to order your Pre, Neo.