This week I decided to critique a story from a Moth Radio Hour segment (Episode:1618, Sept. 6, 2016, starting at 33:52) titled LA Confidential:Data Hacking for a Date which is a story by Chris McKinley. At the time of his story, Chris was a doctoral student working on a PhD in Applied Mathematics at UCLA.  While at UCLA in 2012 he had access to a super-computer known as Yellowstone, and McKinley came up with the novel idea of using the super-computer to “reverse engineer the match algorithm” of the online dating site OKCupid to see if he could come up with the perfect match for himself.

McKinely does an excellent job of building the story by relating the tale of his change from a lonely doctoral student who slept in his cubicle and spent most of his time working on programs for his thesis to a guy who managed to use the super-computer to analyze the match data from the site and determine the most popular characteristics with women on the site.  He soon became the top match for over 30,000 women and he was so popular that he actually got to a point where he was going on a new date every hour with each date lasting only around 3 minutes or so. He got to the point where he was purposely sabotaging the dates because he didn’t want to make the effort to reject the second date offers (of which there were many).  And it was when he started getting dates with women outside of his match preferences that he finally met a woman whom he was really interested in, and ended up marrying her a few years later.

McKinely does a good job of building his story with the following traits –

• Economy: McKinely has a good flow to his story by starting with the image of his humble beginnings (alone, poor, totally engrossed in his work) and builds slowly but effectively with his narrative.  He is efficient in his explanations of a difficult topic – data mining.  He also keeps the audience interested in his travails and accomplishments by using humor at key points. Most of the asides from the main story-line are humorous points that keep the story interesting. In the end, we have an image of a nerdy guy who is now something of a dating king-pin, with more dates than he knows what to do with.
• Sense of Audience: McKinley has a good grasp of his audience, knowing that many of the people in the audience have probably used online dating services.  And that even those who haven’t used dating sites can relate to his story of wanting to be so successful at dating that he is turning away good candidates on a regular basis.  But at the same time, he is able to relate to his audience that even though he thought it would be great to have so many dates, in the end it turned out that there was no quick or easy path to finding the person that was special to him.  Fortunately for him he had a happy ending by finding his future wife. But the moral of the story could well be that even using the latest technologies and techniques of the information age will not necessarily bring the relationships we all seek.
• Research:  I picked this trait because in essence this story is about research.  A guy who spends his entire life working on research suddenly has the all too human desire to find more in life.  And he uses the research that he knows so well to help him find the perfect person, which initially seems to work, but in the end creates a not so ideal situation.  So although there probably wasn’t much research involved in writing this story, the theme of research is very prevalent in the story.

From the DS106 Assignment Bank (visual) –

Make a set of ten photos which take something familiar to you–a town, building, object, etc.–and defamiliarize it, make it seem foreign. Use a mix of extreme closeups, weird lighting, foreground/background focusing and odd angles and other effects to make something that you know very well seem like something you’ve never seen before, something spooky and/or luminous and/or magical.

More information at DS106

   

    

         

What is it in life that makes many of us define our lives by associating ourselves with external forces, whether it’s products, or political parties, or sports teams?  This question seems to be at the heart of the story by Marina Burana titled “Soccer Sunday” (http://munyori.org/fiction/marina-buranas-soccer-sunday-a-short-story/ ).  She finds in her Grandma’s obsession with the sport of soccer the love and connection that had been missing for so many years.

In this story we find out that her Grandma was not the kind of Grandma that she envisioned she should be.  Her expectations were that, “Most people have fascinating grandmothers, or at least, in general, when we mention grandmas, the image of a sweet, tender, loving woman comes to mind.”  But that was not her Grandma.

Her Grandma (who was in her 80s and 90s during the story) was perceived as rude, didn’t seem to care about the rest of the family, and had a single obsession in life – soccer.  But it was when Marina decided to share her Grandma’s obsession as a last resort to get close to her that she discovered, “She was this whole other person in there….And that’s when I met my grandmother. In the soccer field.”

And it was when she eventually helped her Grandma stay in touch with the thing that was so important to her that her Grandma started sharing the love that Marina so much wanted from her Grandma.  And so that external force became the common bond that joined the two women, even though one of them had never shown an interest in soccer before.

Looking at this story using Jason Ohler’s Assessment Traits, I decided to focus on the following three traits:

• Story –I chose this trait because it is the strength of this story. It is a story that most people can relate to because it has familiar characters (grandmothers, uncles, etc.), and taps into a common sentiment of feeling that people who you want to love you may not always love you.The story has an effective structure that works as a discovery tale.  It starts as a description of an expectation that the author has about her Grandma, and it becomes a a story of how she discovers what her Grandma is really about.
• Flow, organization and pacing – Again, I chose this because I felt it was a strength of this story.  I felt that this was a very readable story that met my expectations for how it should develop, and that it flowed well from one part to the next.  But the flow did not seem rushed or in a hurry.  It seemed to have an appropriate pace that I want from a story about a Grandmother.  “Take your time”, I could almost hear Eliza saying.
• Sense of audience – I chose this trait because there are a number of audiences that this story addresses, and they intertwine around a subject that is near and dear to me.  The most prominent audience is the grand-daughter / grandmother relationship, although, this story could easily be about grandsons and grandfathers.  We all have some connection with this audience, although some may feel it stronger than others.  And the author gives us a good sense of how she fits in that group. There is also the soccer fan audience, which is what initially drew me to the story.  Although the soccer can easily be seen as a secondary theme in the story, it also has a prominent role in the ability of Marina and Eliza to connect.  Sports fans in general, including soccer fans, can fully relate to the sense of being a different person when present at a sports event among other fans.

I enjoyed this story because of the compassion, humor, and feeling that was displayed by the author.  Although I was drawn to it by my love of soccer, I stayed with it because of the author’s ability to share the universal feeling of being connected with someone you want to love.

 

On Friday, 12 August 2016, Sean Michael Morris gave one of two closing keynotes at the Digital Pedagogy Lab Institute held at the University of Mary Washington. The title of the talk was Not Enough Voices and can be found at – http://www.digitalpedagogylab.com/hybridped/not-enough-voices/ .

There are a number of thoughts that Mr. Morris shared that intrigued me, including his insistence that we need to get away from the idea that learning is about one person standing at a podium telling the students what they need to learn.  It is instead much more about each person in the class, including the instructor, learning to listen to the many voices and how by listening, we can start to create real knowledge.

As he said, “I do my best to stay quiet because when I’m quiet, I can hear you. And it’s you I’m interested in. Your stories. Your efforts. Your insights.”

And this learning to listen also pertains to online instructors, instructional designers, and educators as a whole.  He laments the emphasis that is placed on quantifying, measuring, and structuring learning.  As he says, “…quantifying learning — that thing that administrations want us to do and for which so many functions of the LMS exist — depends on right answers. And right answers are based on recall of content.”

It is recall of content from the instructor, or material the instructor provides, that earns the approval of administrators.  Students regurgitating the facts and numbers and ideas.  Not creating ideas on their own.

According to Morris, it is the listening to multiple voices where true learning occurs.

“The answer doesn’t lie in turn-taking, but in changing what it means to speak. Make speaking a collaborative event. Join your voice with the voice of students. Join your voice with the voice of other teachers. Join your voice — and this one is really essential if we’re to make any headway — join your voice with the voices of educational technology”.

As an Instructional Designer and an Educational Technologist, it is incumbent upon me to find ways to share the voices in the class.  Measuring is appropriate in it’s place, but I must not make measurements the goal of the class.  Instead, I need to identify when and where real education occurs, and make those learning moments my goal.

Describe in writing for someone who cannot hear, the feeling of silence

Silence is the thing I cannot find.  Unlike you, there are times when I try to imagine a world without sound.  But I never find it.  Everywhere I go there is sound.  Always, relentless.  Even when I cover my ears as best I can, I still hear the sound of my own heart beating.  Do you hear your heart beating?