upbeat. Thanks very much. Well, welcome everybody to Day Two of OLC summer summit, and we are in the first of the parallel sessions, and I'm really looking forward to to seeing what we've got on offer for you today. My name is Debbie Baff and I'm the membership and professional development manager at OLC. And we have two sessions for you with Sara Copland first, and then up afterwards that we've got Debbie, Holly and David Biggins. So Sarah, fair will come to you shortly, But I just want to double-check if anybody Do have any difficulties with using Blackboard Collaborates, Please do let me now. I'm just going to go through these quick slides for you. I'm assuming everyone is all Blackboard collaborated out by now And you probably know everything you'll need to. But if you do need to access the chats you can get That from the bottom right-hand corner. There is a purple chevron If you click that button, that will allow you to access a chat and leave a message. So you can ask questions in the chat and also comment. Fiona and myself are in the background and will try and keep up with the chat and then we can ask your questions for you. If you do want the microphone, we can enable you to have that later on. But at the moment they will kind of stop because they are live sessions. So it's just the chat that you have access to at the moment. So what I will do is I will close these slides down and then I will move over to Sarah. Sarah's going to get ready and we'll just upload your slides for you, Sarah. And then you should have everything you need to get going and you can introduce yourself. I'm just going to pop you on there. There we go. And you should have control. OK, so happy with you. Thanks, Sarah. Thanks very much. That's great. So hello everyone and thanks very much for coming to find out more about reflective pedagogies and how they can be used to support us. So I'm talking about colleagues, learners and ourselves as well through this period of rapid change. And of course, even in ordinary times change can be so unsettling. But if the pressure cooker that we've just found ourselves in for the best part of the year, I think it's better to say that at some point we might feel the need to stop and take stock of where we are and what's changing our everyday professional practice and how we've grown. So I'm Sarah Copeland and I've worked with learning technologies for my whole career actually. As an educational designer I've worked across the board in different aspects of post compulsory education and training. So I've been an academic and an educational developer working with learning technology and online course design. My research area is around digital storytelling in particular context, but I'm interested in the wider movement as well. And now I work as an implementation specialist for an e-portfolio provider. And I'm always looking out for synergies between two different areas. So I'm actually going to turn off my camera. I don't even know if I can do that. I don't even know if it's on. So I imagine for all of us in the room reflective practice will be part of our daily work, but how we record reflections will vary enormously of course. One of the best ways to make sense of a new situation is to discuss it, endlessly I would do with different people. And the opportunity for that has become massively reduced now that all of our meetings are online. And how many of you would want to stay on for an extra hour for a chat when you've had five back-to-back Zoom meetings already? You know, it's so tiring. It's been really difficult. Oh, clicking them in place. I am a bit new to collaborate, so just bear with me. So in this session we're going to explore how digital storytelling can act as a powerful sense-making process collectively and also look at the value of cultural tools around that. But also I'm interested in the processes of reflective practice and thinking about portfolio as a pedagogy, not only in our teaching practice, but also for our own sense-making as well. OK, so the eminent psychologist Jerome Brunner describes narrative as both a mode of thought and an expression of a culture's world view. And that's taken from the culture of education, which is a really good read. Brunner states that it's through our own narratives that we negotiate constructing a representation of ourselves in the world and concurrently it's through narrative that cultural representations of identity and agency are made. Identity, of course, being fluid as we move through experiences and time to grow and develop. So social constructivism holds that learners are actively involved with their teachers and peers in co-constructing knowledge and it particularly recognises the importance of the situation in which learning is taking place and in how that knowledge is constructed in that experience. This epistemological understanding leads to learning and knowledge construction being seen as a social process. So therefore I'm concluding here that telling stories help learners, all of us as learners in life, to make meaning out of experience. Clicking the wrong place, there you go. So what are cultural tools? When considering the role of narrative within the context of culture and therefore our everyday lived experience, we use cultural tools to make sense of how our lives change over time. So the arts and creative practices provide us with a wealth of cultural tools through which we use them to make sense of the world. And it's important to remember these cultural tools change as our lives and communities do as well. I thought the image was particularly timely, I really enjoyed it, I had to get it in there somewhere. Actions can be fundamentally altered as a result of the transformations embedded in the development of cultural tools that the quote I've used there from one of the pieces of literature that I drew on for my PhD work around digital storytelling. And so what are these cultural tools? Well, in this context of course digital storytelling for reflective practice in a variety of settings is one such transformative tool for anything from personal, organisational and community development. And digital storytelling is described in the academic literature as valuable and notes that one outcome of sharing stories is that the sense of a community itself can be strengthened. So it's a really communal, engaging way to make sense of what's going on around us. From a community perspective, if we accept that narrative practices are social practices, then self-representation through narrative is constructed as a social process in relation to other people. One of the projects that I looked up in my research was around US teens and the researchers in this project recognised that participants were voicing their agentive selves. It was called the Dusty Project, somewhere in the States. And they were able to represent and reposition themselves to storytellers, that is, not only in reflecting the personal life but critically commenting on it publicly. And that's one of the key things. Using a platform such as a mediated, complicated narrative can really take the sting out of the tailor's pose. They further conclude that we cannot afford to neglect mediation or means in educational practice the gap we see in literacy levels and potential for achievement, it will widen if we don't do something about that. Now that's looking more at the educational side and benefits in societies of using this. I'm just trying to paint a picture of how powerful, empowering digital storytelling, the methodology can be. But it's a process that we ourselves go through as well. And we've also seen the value in expanding these cultural tools nationwide in a particular project of Nite, which was called Capture Wales. Davie, I don't know if you remember that. It was funded by the BBC probably around 15 years ago now. And teams of community media practitioners went around the whole country working with localised groups of people to hear their stories and then be able to share their stories of life in these varying communities of place and interest. So it's quite a large understanding. Although, I guess, as time has moved on, we've moved much more into the realms of social media. And so it's much easier to have a platform for individual narratives now. Cultural tools spring up all over the place. I mean, let's look at the how quickly TikTok took over and sort of all the means that we're going round with that. I mean, I don't do TikTok myself, but I have seen clips from it. The power that these platforms now have to sort of take these cultural tools more widely is quite astounding. But taking a step back and thinking about the methods behind how you can engender community conversations going and understanding and sharing and breaking down challenging situations, which is particularly the whole point of this talk. OK, to move on. To move on to the next slide, thinking about reflective practice. So this is an assessment on how to write reflectively, obviously. In our community of practice reflection is a very important component of enabling learning. And hopefully we'll employ this technique ourselves, although we may not. I've put another quote up there from Bruna to highlight the empowering nature of thinking about thinking, or the power of reflection. And I've seen many great examples of how universities provide support on this practice, and it's not taught in schools regularly. So it can be an alien concept to undergraduate learners coming in to university in the beginning. And even to be honest, some programs don't really engage with it in the same way. So depending on your discipline, you might not have much exposure to it, I suppose. And the same goes with staff members. If you've not engaged in formal learning programs that have required reflective practice as part of that development, it's not comfortable or familiar with doing. It's more than just writing a blog post. Obviously it's the deep thinking that goes on behind actions that have happened, how you're bringing it to the fore. And I found this really great example from the University of Edinburgh. They have the reflective toolkit available online. I've put the link in there, but you may well know it already. And I really like the way that they start what is reflective practice, the conscious examination of past experiences or some ways of doing things with a goal to surface learning about oneself and the situation and to bring meaning to it. And then of course to inform what happens going forward. So it's such a powerful process to immerse yourself in, having been through a particularly challenging period. So what is it? Is it a process or is it a product? This brings us to this question and it's often the case that end products are the goal in time poor schedules. Runa describes the enemy of reflection as the breakneck pace. The end products can be really helpful not only for those of you who share with, but with yourself as well. The success of creating something is a really great thing to do. But the process of getting there might be the thing that brings the desired effect, regardless of whether the product, cultural tool or otherwise, is shared. So it's so important that the process is given the primacy that it really needs for the real benefits to come out of this. And this was a crucial step in my PhD research, where I was working with community groups to use digital storytelling as the mediator for sometimes difficult conversations in intergenerational groups. That was the context of my research. But of course that's relational to many other different learning contexts. I couldn't rely on my participants creating the artifacts or cultural tools under the ethical code of engagement. So I had to evaluate the process alongside the product to ensure that I was always in control of an outcome of some nature. But the key point here is it's taking part that's crucial to the end goal. For anyone who's undergone the process and the story development cycle once that's been completed, the stories themselves can serve as objects which mediate relationships. And that's something else I've taken from the literature. Okay, so before I move to the next screen I'm actually going to do something I hope that works okay although I'm not seeing the polling button here. Was that something I was supposed to tell you about W beforehand? Nope, I was going to ask a poll. So maybe you could just put in the chat then. Here's my question. Are you aware of the difference between digital storytelling and digital storytelling method? No, it is in there. I'd be really interested to know actually because as we'll go on to explore it's quite ubiquitous. Okay, so I'm getting a lot of notes from the room. That's not surprising but interesting actually that so many people perhaps someone that I have explained the difference to people is the only person that knows. Okay, so if I move on to the next slide. So digital storytelling is an umbrella term that can mean at any level a combination of narrative and a digital platform and I have heard it used for community radio shows and even digital photography where storytelling can be represented visually. It's commonly used in a learning technology capacity to describe a general activity for students to engage with as an alternative presentation format for developing ideas often facilitated by software that allows photographs and video to play alongside text captions and musical soundtracks. Elsewhere in education it can refer to e-portfolios and it's also widely used to refer to many forms of polished media storytelling such as the type of adverts that took you up for charities that you see informative news clips as well any of the mainstream media but essentially it comes from a different place. If anyone's heard any other particular terms of digital or digitised media I'd be really interested to hear because it's a ubiquitous term isn't it? So the digital storytelling method is mostly what I spend my life working with when it comes to my research work. The founders of the Digital Storytelling movement are an organisation now called Storytelling Centre. They're based in the US. They came out of California. They used to be called the Centre for Digital Storytelling and they grew out of a community organisation and in fact have always given primacy to the creative process. But what they've established in their over 25 years of running their workshop format is that for those who engage with the process this can be the most rewarding experience and it does have a transformational quality. Joe Lambert, some of you might be familiar with him is one of the founders of Storytelling Centre and is still at the helm of the organisation and he says this Whilst we do not question the psychological benefit derived from story work ours has not been a fundamentally psychological endeavour for personal transformation. We are not dedicated to long term reclamation of individual lives but actually when you look at the academic literature it records a myriad research projects which demonstrate the transformative potential of their particular process and I can personally attest to that having been on a three day residential workshop and I did find it surprisingly transformative particularly to say I've been working in learning technologies and media all of my working life. So what is the method and what sets it apart I'm just going to post this link in the chat for you to have a look I also put it in Oh you're on it already Louise Thank you So I also put that in the information to look at yesterday so if you had some time before the session today so it's in that page as well The first thing to state is that the first person storytelling is the story centre way so it's all about helping people to find their important story and creating it in both a beautiful and meaningful way that enables them to take a digital story away from the workshop as a living and shareable memory of the process of creation First person storytelling legitimises the process and it brings a great authenticity to it as well Now it's a few years since I've been closely involved with this particular community but I see in Jo Lambert's latest book edition that the story centre have reframed their process more recently to these seven steps and these demonstrate just how much space is given to the exploration of narratives and sense making and we're going to go on to have a look at the technicality of how that's played out in a moment but just looking at these we've got owning your insights and owning your emotions so it's very much a very personal and emotional thing that comes into the process with you and you have to find the moment and see your story so I mean all of these are whole tasks that they have set out and that they use helpful techniques like short exercises to sort of get you in the frame of mind for sharing the important things but once you see your story and you know where it's located and you can hear your story because you record it and you assemble your story and then you share your story and it's in the sharing which certainly last but not least and this is a very crucial phase in the three-day workshop format that the story centre have pioneered so workshops can be open open to anyone to rock up and make a creative artifact but modernity work is actually done with this method where groups are brought together to discuss a topic or share experiences about living place perhaps and much of the work is also done through community of interest and a particularly good example of this is healthcare with lots of work going a story work going on in this area because shared experiences and sharing experiences can be so powerful when difficulties arise and I'm sure all of you are familiar with that concept so the next slide shows the three-day workshop format that I'm familiar with through my training training with Centre for Digital Storytelling as it was then and this is the format that I used and adapted for my own field work but this is widely more or less what people adhere to when they're following the method please do excuse equality of the image unbelievably I couldn't find all of my source materials so I had to take a screenshot from one of my papers that it's in so I'm sorry about that but I'll show that we've got to master different techniques to get from the start to the end of the story process and I'm just going to run through them quickly so we've got on day one the story circle creative writing and the photo editing tutorial so it's very hands on and full on day day two is given over to the movie editing software which obviously if you've never used any software like that before it's really quite a very deep learning curve and very stressful and very tense at times and then on the third day it's finishing off the editing finishing everything off and then you come together for the final screening which is the sharing of the stories together but if you just have a look at some of the activities and outcomes going on in there you're talking about recording your own voice to make the story you're editing through the types of software you've got to work with scripting and storyboarding you've got to get to grips with a scanner although this is probably a bit old technology but still if you're talking about historical photographic artifacts from your family history excuse me and your digital story is one of your family or a historical perspective then of course you need to use these kind of bits of technology you're also having to work with versions and how to apply music soundtracks and then how to add credits etc so in terms of empowering the learning process for digital literacies it's absolutely up there and it's been really important and actually it's one of the key reasons I was drawn to digital storytelling in terms of looking at my field work where I was just trying to find some kind of digital platform for amplifying voices that are otherwise diminished in community groups so it's a really powerful thing but are very full on three days as well okay so just a note on that the script I think I might have missed a section out here so I'm going to see what my next slide is about the it starts with a story circle and this is where the participants would come in at the beginning of day one and you'll see from the photograph I've got up here it is literally a circle and that's really important that it's the closed round it's an enclosed safe space where people are given their allocated time slot to talk about their story and what's powerful to them and then part of the power of the story circle actually is after you've spoken and shared your story is the questions that can come in from the group of participants around you to really help you on how you're framing what it is you're trying to say are you saying an accurate thing I suppose it can be a bit of a sense-ticking moment if you're talking about a story circle of community participants where people might know each other or know the context that they're talking about but ultimately it remains your personal story okay so the story circle is keep clicking on the wrong place by the end of this session so after the story circle we move into a creative writing process and this can take a reasonable amount of time particularly if you're not used to that reflective practice in pulling out the key concepts or the key ideas and the key narrative of what you're trying to say what the most meaningful and impactful things that you want to record are and I've got the image here of the photographs because whilst that's the next step in the process of gathering and editing actually the images can inform the story that's being written so it's an interchangeable part of the process and the creative writing might end up happening in a quiet corner in a room in a workshop situation it can be a solo activity so something that will be quite easy to replicate on your own at home if you were thinking about performing something similar to this online but then the image gathering and editing a very important part of the process is going forward then of course we move on to the movie making now as it was I decided to use the Adobe suite of software to do this because I didn't want the interface to be problematic I have one digital storytelling workshops in further education colleges where we've used the software that's available so free software and sometimes because they're not quite as elegant the interface can end up getting in the way of what you're trying to achieve so there's always a balance to be had there obviously I know most people don't have a copy of a daily premiere it's massively expensive free of software but it does make everything a lot easier but if you do have access to any kind of movie making software and I know that all the time more freely accessible versions are available and I'm not an apple person but I'm sure that Apple have been doing this for years now where you could just download a free app on your phone and do that but it's a really important part of the community process of helping each other in learning the skills to be able to record your movie together and then of course you move on to the final screening now in a remote situation it might be less easy to get this up and running but in the three day workshop format it's an incredibly important and powerful part of the whole process I've referred to it before as champagne and catharsis we were handed us a bubbly when we went for our screening of our films and there is a massive sense of achievement at the end of it they're more than just an individual achievement a shared experience and achievement with all of the participants that have been through that process with you and it's massively rewarding okay so having described what the digital storytelling method the story centre version of the method is in my work I've concluded that a digital story can be defined as a short multimedia artifact conveying a personal narrative with a potential to transform perceptions so it's more than just a here's what happened and the digital storytelling method as a creative and transformational process for both the storyteller and the listener in experiencing an intimate communication okay now slightly not smoothly moving into portfolio of course we're sort of getting a bit clent of time and initially by the way I've submitted this to be an hour long workshop because I thought it would be really nice to work with portfolio and some of the digital storytelling method techniques to try and create an artifact very very briefly within an hour so having to put this down to sort of half an hour presentation hasn't quite worked in the same way so I hope you bear with me with this sort of this brief worry now into purposeful portfolio portfolio of course being able to represent a journey, a story really powerfully actually so it doesn't have all of the digital media or you know sort of some of those transformational processes alongside it but the reality is this is available to all of us at any time of the day without having to go into a workshop to start building a meaningful story and to really enable some deep reflection about what's important in what has gone before and how you want that to inform what is yet to come so I've just put some examples of how portfolio is regularly used and of course not least of which hopefully all of us working towards our semalt revalidation if not for the first time portfolio is a wonderful way to be able to show off everything that you've done built and worked towards and whilst this is not about Pebblepad of course I'm very proud to say that I work for Pebblepad I think it's a wonderful platform that enables some really great reflective practice at the heart of an educational experience but I particularly like this graphic that we have in one of our documents you can download from the link that I've added on the screen so thinking about what portfolio means to learners and people on a learning journey which doesn't have to mean in a formal educational context of course so planning and preparing all of the work that's happening or changes or experiences recording and working on those experiences is really a key part of reflective practice of course at its whole nature but part of building a new portfolio where you can collect and curate all of the evidence and all of the different media forms that show what you've been doing building up towards the final sharing and showcasing of your journey what it is that you're doing and it's a similar journey to the digital storytelling method where you're working up going through a transformative process and building towards being able to share this at the end so I just wanted to finish by sort of going through a bit of a reflection myself because I wrote this session outline in late March when the lockdown was fresh and presented a great unknown to all of us and six months on we're kind of establishing this new normal now but I'm still hearing from plenty of friends and colleagues in the university that days are still very long still very high and we certainly haven't been immune from that ourselves in the private sector we've been responding to requirements in a similar way so having experienced the transformative effect of digital storytelling the workshop in a period of great change in my own life when I was in my PhD I can only really highly recommend the personal benefits that go along with that and also the collective benefits to our community of practice this image conveys the sense of physical isolation may have experienced through lockdown particularly from our colleagues the shift in working exclusively online has not been necessarily easy for us as a community and it's so ironic that we sort of sell for one to a better word the channels of this educational work but we don't necessarily want to be living in it trying to determine ourselves there's been a really hard time and whilst it's great that we're finally getting the recognition as a community of practice that's so long overdue it takes some time out to reflect on it individually but also with our teams could be really beneficial and a transformative experience so Debbie that's all I had to say on this bit of a sort of positional piece rather than talking about a specific project but I am happy to talk to anyone about the work that I have been involved with with digital storytelling if you'd like to say more or how it could be applied in your context at work that was really great thanks Sarah sorry I had to keep annoying you with little trying not to laugh at the frogs sorry really really great presentation and well done you because I know you had done a lot of work to kind of squish it all down into half an hour so really really cool and yeah I'm sure that some of the links that have been shared as well people will probably come and pick your brains afterwards I didn't notice any specific questions but if there are any questions please do feel free to pop them in the chat we might well actually move to the next speaker just to make sure that we get everybody into time but we will have a couple of minutes we can stay on afterwards if you do have any specific questions for Sarah that you want to add in later is that okay with you Sarah? absolutely fine thank you very much thank you everyone really great thanks Sarah I'm going to stop your slides I'm just going to pop our other slides up there we go so that we've got our top and tail slides in there and then Fiona can stop the recording and then restart it