A Month of Reviewing

This month, we finally put all of that brainstorming and researching and planning into practice. Yes, this month we finally get to work on our projects! When I first covered the Reviewing Phase, I said it was important to the personal learning environment (PLE) because it promotes active and deep learning.

One of the best ways to learn a new concept is to get your hands dirty with it. If you’ve been following along all year, you’re fairly well aware of this. If you’ve been reading this blog for any period of time, you’re definitely aware of this. When you actively engage with material, it affects you on a deeper level because you’re connecting with it. You’re seeing for yourself what happens when you do something, and what happens when you alter what you’re experiencing. That leaves an imprint on you.

That’s also why we call it the Reviewing Phase. Yes, you’re doing. You’re creating. You’re applying. But you’re also observing your results, and making decisions based on those results. You’re constantly analyzing your work, looking for better ways to get from your research and plans to a finished project. There’s a lot going on in this phase, and we’re going to look at through the same lenses we’ve reviewed the other phases.

The Reviewing Phase is your chance to play, to practice, to get into your project and really have fun with it. It’s going to be hard work, but at the end of it, you’re going to have an awesome product and be a changed person. So let’s get going!

The Business of Short and Serial Stories

I’ve been hearing a lot of talk over the last few months about how serial stories and short stories are radically changing the face of modern publishing. Both forms are so innovative and are just what our short-attention-span society needs right now.

Really? That’s so cute.

But here’s the first problem with that claim: The first short stories were published around the turn of the nineteenth century, and the form had been present before that as the main vehicle for the oral tradition. With the advent and popularization of the magazine, short stories found a home among Victorian middle class readers. These published stories were originally folksy or literary in nature, but soon detective and mystery stories caught on, leading to the serial story.

That’s actually the second problem. By the 1830’s, serial stories were becoming a regular occurrence in magazines. Inspired by the Arabian fairy tale Scheherazade, novelists realized they could build up suspense and readership by releasing one chapter at a time through the magazines. When moving pictures came along, they adopted that serial/episodic structure in releasing early pictures. Then when television came on the scene, some shows adopted that same serial/episodic structure that moviegoers were already familiar with. We still see this today in televised series, regardless of their platform.

What this means for publishing is that everyone should be looking to writing sites like the various fan fiction and original fiction sites for guidance, as they have helped keep the model in common use (even when the platform doesn’t support serial stories. I’m looking at you, deviantArt.). Because what we’re experiencing as these shorter serial stories gain ground is a return to an older, successful publishing model. And it’s not a return to existence so much as it is a return to mainstream publishing.

Cool Down

Autodidactic practice is lonely.

How’s that for an opening?

I don’t know if anyone else has this problem, but I have long had to fight for my research and practice time. Friends and family have this image of me cooped up in a dark, closed-off room, no connection to humanity, doing who knows what. So, in an effort to save me from myself, these well-meaning folk try to drag me off to do things. Somehow, I have always managed to get things done anyway.

Because the simple fact is: autodidactic practice is only as lonely as you choose to let it be.

These days, communities of like-minded people to work and create with, to practice with, to share with, can be found just about anywhere. Offline. Online. Some combination of the two. We’re very lucky.

I think that’s one of the reasons I like hitRECord. It’s a space to share your own work in relation to a given theme or topic, but you can also interact and collaborate with others with complementary skills. You can be at the same level. You can be on entirely different levels. It doesn’t matter. Anyone who wants to help explore a topic through a creative means is welcome, and in my experience the community has been welcoming and encouraging. It’s a safe place to learn and develop skills, both for yourself and from others.

And in case you haven’t noticed, I’m a big fan of finding practical outlets to serve as practice spaces.

But remember that all projects go through a cycle, the last of which is a period of reflection, a time to review your work, to figure out what you did that worked and what you did that you would do differently next time. This is what makes practice a key part of the learning process – learning from mistakes helps you become stronger in a skill. You can do this in a private journal (I actually have a section of my digital journal dedicated to this. I call it my sketchbook.), or you can be really brave and let others learn from your experience by sharing it in a blog or social media space.

However you choose to wrap up your projects, always make sure you’ve learned from the experience and that you’re moving forward with an eye on your development in your next steps.

So, this is it for our month-long look at the awesomeness known as practice. Next month, we put what we’ve learned this month to use as we explore the Reviewing phase of the personal learning environment. (Don’t worry. The name is a total misnomer.)

Natural Talent and Practice

We can’t have a discussion about practice without talking about those who appear to have a natural talent.

People who have a natural talent at something…are challenging. They’re the ones who pick things up quickly, who can bring a grace or precision to what they do. They’re fun to watch, even when they’re insufferable to be around…for various reasons.

The problem with people who are natural talents is that often they feel that they don’t need practice. They can already run with the big dogs, so why do they need to practice?

And they’re right….at least about running with the big dogs. But just like experts and masters have to keep practicing, engaging more in deliberate practice to keep up and fine tune their skills, natural talents have to do the same thing or they’ll be lapped by the people who’ve been working hard all along.

What’s worse is when a teacher, coach, or mentor, for whatever reason, agrees with the natural talent and lets them slide. They do that person a huge disservice. There literally is no level of talent that cannot benefit from practicing.

What I hope you’re understanding here is that practice is a part of the learning process. A very necessary part, regardless of where you are in your development.

A History of Hyperlinked Texts

While watching a recent Idea Channel episode looking at the relationship between technology and television, I started thinking about my early experiments with interactive fiction. Because this is how my brain works some days…

Like so many adventure-loving kids in the eighties, I read my fair share of Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) books. I loved being able to decide how a story was going to go. After several rounds of dying across several of the more popular CYOA books of the period, I got over it…right up until a G.I. Joe-themed CYOA series was released. They weren’t any better, and I moved on from the genre all together.

When I first started playing with interactive fiction as a writer and curriculum designer, I was looking at a way to build one in LiveJournal, coding in links between the different pieces. But my knowledge of HTML was too limited, and I couldn’t find a way to mask paths through the story that didn’t feel like they were revealing where a player was headed. That was always one of my main complaints with CYOA books as a kid. If a choice suddenly forced me backwards, I knew I wasn’t going to survive the book. And it got me thinking about the similarities between the interactive fiction form and hyperlinked texts.

Well, it turns out that wasn’t the craziest association to make.

HTTP, the hypertext transfer protocol, was first established in 1991, but hypertext itself was established in 1965. Hypertext uses a bit of code to allows you to link documents together. We often use it to link web pages together, or as a quick address method when we want to share web pages with other people, although there are also offline uses.

The first CYOA was written in the early 70’s by a computer programmer. He had become fascinated by the unique storytelling approach offered by then-new tabletop RPGs that were coming out. Inspired, he started playing with the idea behind hypertext, creating stories where the different scenes were linked together in such a way that the reader could pick different paths through the story. Each story was self-contained in a book. The storyform was so unusual that he couldn’t find a publisher until Bantam finally agreed to take a chance on him in the late 70’s.

CYOA gave rise to a computer-based storytelling form originally called hypertext fiction for the code it relied on to connect the various scenes of the story. Zork, released in 1980, is generally regarded as the first hypertext fiction. The form continued to grow and find popularity and uses. These days, storytellers call the form interactive fiction, which incorporates not only the linked scenes and choices, but some rather robust puzzles and nonplayer characters (NPCs) to interact with. Game designers and curriculum designers call this form branched storytelling, relying more on linked scenes and iterative paths through a story, allowing you to revisit a scene with different material and results.

So, a piece of code that we take for granted has become a storytelling tool that continues to innovate and serve a variety of purposes and uses. That’s kind of cool.