Erica Hargreave

Bringing Stories to Life as a Speaker, & Digital & Immersive Media Strategist & Storyteller

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Online Course Activity Break #1 : Git Up Challenge

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I love teaching my online courses, and I love the freedom that taking online courses affords me as a student. It means that I don’t have to give up other work or life matters to teach and to study, and I can accept opportunities in other parts of the world while teaching and studying.

Thanks to studying online, I was able to partake in the OER19 conference in Galway, Ireland this past Spring.

However, like with most things in life there are ups and downs to teaching and learning online. One area that I have been questioning for sometime now, is finding a healthy balance between screentime and time being present in the real world. Exploring that balance was the focus of my research in Master of Educational Technology Course ETEC 500. As a result, I have decided to start to put reminders into each of my Units this term in my BCIT Course, BCST 1073: Building Your Digital Media Presence, to take a break from the computer and get up to stretch, dance, meditate …etc. I plan to share many of these Activity Breaks with all of you here, in case you are thinking of doing something similar. Feel free to copy and modify these for your own online courses, if so desired.

Learning to disconnect and be present in the natural world from Cornelia Krikke.

Here is the first activity break that I’ve shared with my students:

Activity Break #1: Git Up Challenge

Time to get up, swing your arms and dance! (Photo by Paulette Wooten, via UnSplash.)

After dealing with a concussion in my own online studies, and spending some time researching healthy screen-time / real world balance in one of my Master’s courses, I’ve decided to add some reminders for activity breaks into our course.

I thought, I’d start with a little dance break and the Git Up Challenge, as it is also a fun example of an interactive media craze in action.

From a couple of Canadians that have taken up the challenge …

In case you need to learn the steps …

An example of the Git Up Challenge being used to educate, and for social good …

And a bit of social media thinking with examples of the craze spreading across Tik Tok …

I made this a discussion, just in case anyone feels so inspired to partake in the challenge, and wishes to share their video with us!

Oh, and if you have a suggestion for future Activity Breaks in the course, feel free to share your ideas in the discussion.

If you have links to your own or other people’s activity breaks in online courses, I’d love to see and hear about them. Tell us about them in the comments below.

History & Technology Merge with the Fairmont Château Laurier’s History App

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I am a bit of a history buff!  One of my secret desires is to one day write a historic thriller.

For that reason, one of my favourite past times in a new place is actually taking a historic tour of the place I am staying in.  I can almost hear as I say this, the cringing of some of those I’ve travelled with, who find hotel tours to be a sales / marketing pitch, and while some can be, others can be the most magnificent journeys back in history.  As I write this, I am remembering a glorious afternoon in Memphis spent with the Assistant Duckmaster & Hotel Historian at the Peabody, Doug Weatherford. I really could not have asked for a more delightful way to have spent the afternoon, then walking back in Memphis history with Doug.  In fact, this visit was one of the highlights of trip to Memphis, better than my tour of Gibson Guitars, better than my visit to Stax Records, and WAY better than the circus that was Graceland. At any rate, I will write more about my adventure back in time with Doug another day on Roamancing. Today, I want to to put my tech specs on in combination with my historian hat, as I take you further North to the Fairmont Château Laurier.

Fairmont Château Laurier in Ottawa
Fairmont Château Laurier, an Ottawa hotel rich in history.

This past spring on a visit to Ottawa, I was fortunate enough to stay at the Fairmont Château Laurier, a hotel steeped in history, a history I wanted to learn more about. Rather than give me an actual tour, the hotel asked me if I could try out their new interactive history tour.  Being a bit of a tech nerd, and loving seeing and experiencing examples of technology being used to educate and tell story, I readily agreed.

Right now the Fairmont Château Laurier’s history tour is available on iPads and tablets, although I rather hope that it will at some point be available on other devices, like smart phones. Anybody with an iPad or tablet can take the tour for free, whether they are a guest or not, they just need to download the Fairmont Château Laurier History App (from the links I’ve provided in this paragraph).  If you don’t have an iPad or tablet, but are fortunate enough to be a guest of the Fairmont Château Laurier, you can borrow an iPad for the tour from the front desk.

Fairmont Château Laurier History App
Beginning my walk back in history at the Château Laurier.

Once begun this digital tour takes visitors to the Fairmont Château Laurier on a walking tour, starting in the hotel’s lobby. It provides an informative and interesting narrative, including historic photos, as it walks you through various rooms of the hotel, intertwining history with the current space visitors see before their eyes.

Fairmont Château Laurier History App
Discovering fascinating past visitors to the Château Laurier.

Fairmont Château Laurier History App
Wandering through the historic halls of the Château Laurier.

So my take on the experience?  I very much enjoyed it, as it gave me context to the space I was walking through (oh, if the walls could only talk), and snippets of history I’d been hearing about (like, did you now there is an historic connection between the Château Laurier and the Titanic?). It also got me to explore deeper into the hotel, right into the depths of the basement.  I only wish that I’d taken this tour at the beginning of our stay, rather than at the end, as it would have ensured that I made it down to the basement for a dip in that fabulous art deco pool, and would have enriched my stay so much more, with the stories of the history that surrounded me.

Now does this compare to the kind of tour that a Hotel Historian and Storyteller, like the Peabody’s Doug Weatherford gave me?  No, but afternoons such as that one are special, to be cherished, that cannot happen all the time due to scheduling and the likes. There are after all only so many Historians and Storytellers, like Doug Weatherford around, and they can’t be scheduled around the clock to suit visitor’s schedules. Catering to visitor’s schedules and the access to historic imagery are what made this technology driven digital walk back in time such a win in my mind. The weary traveller could even take the tour digitally from the awfully comfy Fairmont Château Laurier bed, as a form of a bed time story, or the uber organized traveller could watch in prep for their stay, even on-route to Ottawa on the plane or train. I, however, think it is enjoyed best as a leisurely stroll through the Fairmont Château Laurier’s historic halls.

Enjoy!

Managing the Social Networking Feed for an Event? Check Your Ego at the Door.

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Effectively managing social media for another (whether individual, brand, traditional media or conference) means checking your ego and personal biases at the door, and being true to the client’s community, voice and needs.  It’s about them and their community, not about you.  If you do things untoward or disrespectful to their community when representing them, it reflects poorly on them, and ultimately on you.  This is never more true then in the case of a conference or festival, as conferences and festivals are all about community. As such you want to use an event’s social feeds to be supportive of that community, especially if you want the community to support the event in return, through sharing and using the event’s hashtag.

A twitterfall from a past conference, where all tweets with the event hashtag showed up in the stream.

I was recently reminded of this at a recent conference.  The conference had a hashtag, and tweets using the hashtag were shared in a live twitter stream or were they?  Tweeting from 3 different handles, it didn’t take me long to realize that only my own personal tweets were being shared in the live twitter stream, while those of my company and one of our characters were not.  Since these tweets were live I looked to see if either the company or the character had said something that could be construed as offensive.  They had not.  In fact, typically at a conference, our company tweets most of the ideas being shared from the company feed, our personal opinions from our personal feeds, and items of a lighter nature from our storytelling characters.  I could understand our one characters’ tweets being edited out of the feed, as she has a reputation for being racy, but our company’s tweets that were the tamest of the lot?  Our company, I might add, that had been supportive of the particular conference for a number of years.

In pondering this oddity, I discovered we were not alone. Others were discovering that the twitter stream was selective about what was being shared too.  Given a good reason for this, like keeping the tweets focused on the business side of the conference, this would have been understandable, but then why were our company’s tweets not being included?  As best as anybody could tell, it came down to reducing exposure to a potential competitor for those managing the feed. Their company’s tweets showed in the live twitter stream, but not those of any company that potentially competed with them in the market.  The result?  Many at the conference that noticed this were left with a bad taste in their mouth.  A Social Networking FAIL for sure, at a conference that was suppose to be helping people to move forward in the transmedia space and demonstrate positive examples for them.

Science and the Arts Are Not Polar Opposites

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I often have people look at me with surprise when they learn that I am a scientist.  “But you are so creative???”

This attitude towards science, has always perplexed me, as a true scientist is highly creative … these are after all our Out-Of-The-Box thinkers.  Just look to history, and you’ll see that some of our greatest scientists were highly creative and accomplished artists ~  Leonardo da Vinci for example.  I mean for heaven’s sakes, it takes a creative mind, like that of Galileo, to challenge the perception of our whole world view in the 1600s from seeing it as a sphere, as opposed to flat.

 

Leonardo da Vinci’s Paddle Boat, as photographed by Érinn Cunningham.

 

I was reminded how perplexing I find this disconnect in people’s minds between science and creativity when I was sitting in a Merging Media session this morning on successful tech start-up business tools, presented by the Canadian Film Centre.  The tools were basically apps for building a business plan (Business Model Canvas) and to apply the Scientific Method to your business plan (Validation Board), or in the case of this room, your storytelling project. I started getting excited at the idea of the Validation Board (although it did strike me that a such research, experimenting and hypothesizing should be a given to any transmedia project). That is when the presenter started to discuss what a pain and how dull working through the Scientific Method is.  This was intended to be their way of saying that even though they hated the process, it was useful to the success of their project.  How this impacted me, however, was with incredulance that the Scientific Method would be treated as a dull necessity.  The Scientific Method is both a creative process and an engaging one.

 

A Slide of the Validation Board

 

Now, not everybody may get as excited about the Scientific Method as I do.  That aside, when teaching, you don’t want to set your students’ minds at odds with the process you are asking them to partake in, and given that this room was comprised of a good deal of academics, I am sure I was not the only one offended by the poor treatment of the Scientific Method. Put on my  storytelling hat, and the notion that the storytelling community would not understand something labeled in scientific terms is equally as offensive. Furthermore, having been involved in organizing many of the original events in Canada on bridging the traditional media and technology communities, encouraging storytellers and technologists to work together to build transmedia, this attitude creates a step backwards in that conversation.  It puts the two groups at odds, which is not where they should be, especially given that we were at a transmedia conference. I am happy report that once we started to apply the discussed applications to select projects in the room, the participants of the Master’s Class were highly engaged in the process. They enjoyed it and saw the benefits of it.

I look forward to continue to build transmedia in the manner it should be, in which both the storytellers and the technologists (scientists included) are treated with the creative respect that they both deserve.

Three Women in Tech I Admire

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Apparently today is Ada Lovelace Day.  I didn’t know about this day until a few hours ago when Tris Hussey told me about it. For those of you similarly unaware, Ada Lovelace Day is a day in which we honour women in tech that we respect by writing a blog post about them.

The day is named after Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace. Ada is mainly known for having written a description of Charles Babbage‘s early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine. She is today appreciated as the “first programmer” since she was writing programs—that is, manipulating symbols according to rules—for a machine that Babbage had not yet built. She also foresaw the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching while others, including Babbage himself, focused only on these capabilities – from Wikipedia

Ada Lovelace - The first computer programmer and 19th century mathematician by Aristocrat.

 

Pretty amazing to think of anyone, female or male, being so advanced and forward thinking.  She did this in the early-mid 1800s, whilst I myself am only just learning to code.

When I think of the women in technology that I have interacted with in the past year and a half, it is pretty difficult to limit this post to one woman.  There are so many women in tech that I respect and are amazed by.  I know last year I was impressed with all the women that were involved in putting Bridging Media together with Meg and I. I want to make this celebration special, however, so I am going to highlight three women whom I was fortunate enough to recently share a panel with at the Women in Film Festival New Media Day – Monica Hamburg, Carol Sill and Gillian Shaw.

 

Photographed by Tris Hussey

 

Monica Hamburg, because she never seizes to surprise me with how many ways she can use social media to bring a smile to my face and a chuckle to my belly.

Carol Sill, because she was one of the first people to introduce me to blogging and social media.  Even though she came from a world of traditional media, she immediately recognized the value of emerging and social media, embraced it whole heartedly, and shared it with those around her.

Gillian Shaw, because she is a testament to the fact that we can bridge traditional and emerging media, and by altering the manner in which we tell our stories, we will see media evolve rather than die.

Ladies – I do hope we get to do the second half of our panel, sometime in the not so distant future. I feel most fortunate for knowing and sharing with each of you.

The Green Chain: A Film Review

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Full Disclosure: The Green Chain’s producers, Tony Wosk and Mark Leiren-Young are friends mine, but that does not mean that I’d automatically like their movie.  And to be honest I didn’t like it ….. I loved it!  I knew Mark was a good writer, but this isn’t just good writing, this is great writing.

If you don’t know what The Green Chain is about, here’s the synopses:

The Green Chain is a powerful, funny and thought-provoking film about the conflicts between people on both sides of the battle who love trees — and are willing to risk anything to protect their personal visions of the forest.

The Green Chain by emmerogers.

 

‘Powerful’ is the perfect descriptor for this film.  It really hit a chord for me and rang so true to many of my own experiences.  I’ve worked in the forestry industry, am a biologist and been an environmentalist, and I saw so much of the dialog and characters in myself and the people I met along the way. It’s uncanny how Mark writes them so perfectly. In my late teens, I was the kid that would have found it to be an adventure to live in the tree and as a biologist I would have been there for many of the reasons that the Raging Granny shared.  As I matured and spent more time in the smaller towns of BC, I discovered that my youthful ideals were a little naive.  It doesn’t matter that I now recognize that the story has more sides, to the forestry workers in the small towns I will always be seen as an educator and one time forestry researcher, and they’ll be too busy defending their right to log to hear me say, ‘I understand’.  My cousin will get into actual fights with me where I don’t say a single word, because in her mind I’m still that scrappy, tree hugging, granola eating, 19 year old, who’d still love to live in a tree (I’d be lying to say I’d never considered it).

I love the way in Mark’s account of this age old story, all the characters touch each others lives.  He does this so seamlessly, but so that it really pulls at the heart strings of our own connectivity, just like that of the ecosystem.  And the beauty is this isn’t just a story about logging.  This is a tale that speaks to many small towns and natural resource based industries. Speaking from the BC perspective, this story could just as easily be fish or rocks.

 

Photographed by Robert Shaer

 

Oh and I don’t think you have to be an uber science geek like myself to enjoy The Green Chain.  It is simply a good story and I’ll be the first to admit I am a critical audience.  I’m critical of science stories as I am a scientist and storyteller.  There’s nothing to be critical of here, it’s just a darn good story and accurate.  And unlike some science stories, it’s far from boring.  In fact, I will likely watch it numerous time, as I enjoyed it that much!

Go see it!  You still have time to make the late show!  It starts at 9:10 pm.

Failing that, the daily show times of The Green Chain at Fifth Avenue Cinema, between now to Thursday March 11th, are 1:30, 4:45, 7:10 and 9:10 pm.