Of Stories, Social Media and a bit of Lego
As many of you have seen from the Dev diaries, CTIL are very busy undertaking the work required for this major project. However, I was able to take some time out last week to attend 2 sessions run by OPD.
Tuesday’s session was looking at the University approach to Social Media.
Like many, I use social media extensively myself socially. For work related purposes, my focus till now has primarily been a combination of my own learning (developing a PLN, becoming part of a community, encouraging students to use them to develop communities, etc).
However, as we need to enhance communication as a team, I realised that it was going to be invaluable for me to attend one of these sessions, in order to better make use of the existing University presences on Social Media, as well as enhance our own blog, twitter and other channels. In CTIL, as we’re focussed primarily on supporting learning and teaching, in addition to promotional activities, we want to support other members of the University (both staff and student) to enhance their digital capabilities. This session, while primarily addressing the promotional aspects, helped me think about potential approaches to the support side.
On Wednesday I attended an excellent session run by Kevin from The Story Edge, on how we can use a story telling approach to engage an audience, whether that’s as part of a teaching approach, to share good practice from across the University, or to help users understand the need for, and the benefits of, change. While many of the aspects were things I think I tend to do automatically, (for example, focus on an individual if we’re trying to share good practice), there are certainly points that I don’t always think about. In particular, the fact that a Good Story requires . In order to get us used to the idea, we initially as a group broke down a familiar film into the 8 step framework he outlined. Our group picked Cinderella – one lesson we felt she could have learnt was “Don’t leave at Midnight!”
We then moved to looking at a more work focussed approach – but staying in groups, it’s often more useful to hear others’ ideas, and their idea on your thoughts – after all, they may well be our story readers.
So, where does the Lego come into it? At the weekend, I attended, purely out of interest, a session at Verdant works, run by Jon from Playful Communications, looking at Stop motion animation using Lego. I’d originally gone for fun, but quickly realised that it could be invaluable for work.
Yesterday’s @VerdantWorks #LEGO #animation workshop in a nutshell… #MadeOnAMobile #PlayfulComms pic.twitter.com/cLQXtlYnhd
— Jon #OpenCloseMovie (@OnTheSuperFly) October 28, 2018
(Perhaps I should have composed this whole post as a story, then animated it … )