The Importance of Story and Design
Editor’s note: This blog entry was submitted by Erin Murphy, who works in Wharton’s Learning Lab. You can read more of her work at her blog: The Big Picture.
Just in time for Daniel Pink’s appearance at the Wharton Evolution of Learning symposium, I was reminded of the importance of two of the six aptitudes that he lays out in his book A Whole New Mind. Those aptitudes are story and design.
At today’s Distributed Learning Roundtable (April 23rd), Doug Lynch*, Lou Metzger*, and Amit Das* gave a presentation on their experience with incorporating film into distributed learning and the moral of the story happened to be an emphasis on story and design. Doug Lynch wanted a clever way to get executives in his programs to learn how to interact with technology without being blinded by the hype often associated with it. They chose to teach the executives how to make short educational films to prove the point that simply knowing how to use the technology doesn’t ensure a spectacular and engaging final product. Using technology for educational purposes is more about design — it’s all about the story and the process.
Professor Amit Das was tasked with teaching the executives how to make *good* movies – meaning movies that detail a learning objective in an engaging and purposeful way. Lou Metzger was tasked with selecting technologies that would be accessible and easy to use. Using the inexpensive and user-friendly Flip camera paired with iMovie and Windows moviemaker (the default movie makers on Macs and PCs), Amit took the executives through several cycles of shooting, editing, and posting to get them comfortable with the technology in a traditional classroom face to face setting. Later using Adobe Connect and Captivate online, Amit taught the executives the importance of things like story/scripting, camera angle, sound, and lighting.
At the beginning of these classes, Amit said that no one had a solid understanding of what a story was – he had to explain the importance of having a likable character who goes through some kind of conflict or struggle to receive a payoff of some sort (a “happy” ending). He reported that engagement is all about emotion and emotion can really be evoked through story. By the end of the classes, the executives were producing thought-provoking and emotion-evoking stories with the technology.
Doug, Lou, and Amit all did a wonderful job of conveying their experiences to the audience – and thank you to Karen Asenavage for organizing the Distributed Learning Roundtables! I’ll have more blogs about those in the future.
I want to end with some of Daniel Pink’s thoughts on story and design, because I think they are important elements of any type of work we do in life … but they have a particularly strong relevance to teaching. From the beginning of when I started this blog, design and story have been recurring elements in any kind of learning technology.
Excerpts from Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind (2005):
Design is a high-concept aptitude that is difficult to outsource or automate — and that increasingly confers a competitive advantage in business. Good design, now more accessible and affordable than ever, also offers us a chance to bring pleasure, meaning, and beauty to our lives. But most important, cultivating a design sensibility can make our small planet a better place for us all. “To be a designer is to be an agent of change,” says CHAD’s Barbara Chandler Allen (Pink 86).
We are our stories. We compress years of experience, thought, and emotion into a few compact narratives that we convey to others and tell to ourselves. That has always been true. But personal narrative has become more prevalent, and perhaps more urgent, in a time of abundance, when many of us are freer to seek a deeper understanding of ourselves and our purpose.
More than a means to sell a house or even to deepen a doctor’s compassion, story represents a pathway to understanding that doesn’t run through the left side of the brain. We can see this yearning for self-knowledge through stories in many places — in the astonishingly popular “scrapbooking” movement, where people assemble the artifacts of their lives into a narrative that tells the world, and maybe themselves, who they are and what they’re about, and in the surging popularity of genealogy as millions search the Web to piece together their family histories.
What these efforts reveal is a hunger for what stories can provide — context enriched by emotion, a deeper understanding of how we fit in and why that matters. The Conceptual Age can remind us what has always been true but rarely acted upon — that we must listen to each others’ stories and that we are each the authors of our own lives (Pink 115).
*Doug Lynch, Vice Dean GSE and Academic Director Wharton Executive Education
*Amit Das, Executive Director GSE Executive Education and former Professor at the Tisch School of the Arts and former director of film, video, and television program at NYU.
*Lou Metzger, IT Technical Director of Executive Educatiom
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