Inspired by No Mimes Media's amazing transmedia campaign for The Dark Knight...and the work of Simon Brookes at Portsmouth University on alternate reality games for education, I recently did a little micro-transmedia experiment of my own...
The whole idea of an immersive, crossmedia, semi-real experience as a way of engaging students with learning makes sense to me on so many levels. Engaging students with learning is something it can be pretty difficult to do when you're constrained by the environment in which you are scheduled to teach. For me, that's quite often a lecture theatre which places me centre stage and students seated in tiered rows; trapped for an hour with no means of escape (poor things). So, creating learning experiences that work in a lecture theatre and that are participative and interactive for a large group is something I spend quite a bit of time trying to achieve.
For me, transmedia has amazing potential as a 'teaching and learning strategy' (as the teacher educators would call it). The possibility of creating a narrative that students buy into and participate in in class, and that gets them thinking about topics, solving problems, trying out approaches and gaining experience is a win - win. In my experience, students learn best when they're absorbed in a task, and they love the sense of achievement they get from problem solving.
So, I set about doing a test of what I'm going to call a 'micro-transmedia' experience at a recent internal conference, with an audience of students, faculty and business people, just to give it a go really. What a brilliant experience it was. My story unfolded over the 20 minute session, and the whole room participated in one way or another in solving the problem. After all the preparation, it was like tapping the first piece in one of those amazing domino trails you used to see on Record Breakers (showing my age).
I used a combination of actors (recruited from my colleagues - with much arm twisting and promises of chocolate), found objects (including a borrowed iPad - which I was a little nervous about disappearing...), letters, tweets, YouTube videos and the web. Some of the material can be seen on Twitter here: www.twitter.com/app5isalive and here:
The scenario is designed to introduce a session on IP, and so the narrative was based on an IP theft. It worked really well, and I'm convinced that it will work even better in a 'students only' environment. However, I think these micro-versions need to be used sparingly in order to maintain interest, and indeed this game dramatised a situation for impact. I can see huge potential for longer versions, however, that are embedded in the curriculum and assessment where a more 'realistic' experience is created. The opportunity to provide students with practical experience while reducing risk to businesses, students and the institution is one of the key benefits I see in developing alternate reality environments. For me, this provides the best of both worlds - the real experience of a live project, along with the ability to try, fail, test, and experiment in a safe 'sandbox' environment that you get with traditional computer-based business simulations.
Today's students are engaged in activities that cross the boundaries between reality and fiction at all times: Reality TV, gaming, social media, fashion, music, sports, books, films, theatre; our lives are one big mash-up of constructed semi-realities and personal perceptions of what is real and what is true. This is how many of us live today, in a constant state of tension and negotiation of what is true for us, for others, and in the context of the messages we absorb from these media. It seems only right to engage with this in creating learning experiences that allow our students to try, to test, and to construct their own version of reality...
More about this later, but if there are any educators or marketers out there who want to find out what I did...and what I've got planned next, tweet me @lgsmu.
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