Assignment 2: Short Story Proposal

My grandfather recently passed away.  That event brought many questions I have about family into focus.  I want to explore the choices individuals make with respect to supporting family by creating a fictional short story.  I hope the story will be of interest to nearly everyone, given that family is a complex system we all know.

I plan to tell the story in the third-person, focalized through the perspectives of a grandfather, mother, brother, son, and omnipresent narrator.  This will be an experiment of sorts.  I hope to minimize the use of the omnipresent narrator, but I feel I will need to rely on such a perspective to develop characters and link some events.

The first event will be the death of the grandfather.  The next event will focus on planning for the care of the widow.  This will give rise to a rich debate between the mother and her son.  Finally, the brother will reflect on his father’s life and support the widow.
 
The key rhetorical device will likely be the question, though I hope to learn and use many others.  I will use a video of the grandfather in the final event where the brother reflects on his father’s life.  I plan to use audio to enhance the debate.  I don’t know what I will do for images, but I suspect I will wind up drawing pictures of settings.

I don’t plan to change the focalization or temporal arrangement in the course of developing each pass unless it proves necessary to incorporate the media.  The story and plot should remain constant throughout each pass.

This assignment is loaded with challenges.  Just writing the story will be a challenge as I haven’t done this before.  The development and use of media will be a challenge.  I hope that once I write the story, I will begin to see where different media elements can be used to enhance the story.  I’m not sure how I will introduce interactivity into my story, so I expect this to be a challenge.  I’m considering having different endings, but I again hope that once I write the story, new ideas will flourish.

The Structure of Things

I wondered if I might be in the wrong class after reading Rosemary Huisman’s Narrative concepts.  The section on Rhetorical figures, where Huisman explained synecdoche, metaphor, and metonymy in terms of things and then switched to speak in terms of signs, made me question my ability to read the English language.  I was quite sure Huisman was going to leave me behind when she introduced structuralism and post-structuralism, but to my surprise, she made me see how this class will be critical to my further studies.

Huisman helped me develop thoughts on epistemology.  I’ve been thinking about the foundations of learning theories lately.  I’ve struggled to understand the positivists and the interpretivists orientations on knowledge.  The idea and beauty of an external objective reality we struggle to discover seems intuitive.  I’ve always seen a natural beauty in math, gravity, and patterns.  Have I been too focused on the object that I neglected to properly consider the subject?

Growing up with an appreciation for math provided me with an appreciation for Saussure’s dualism of la langue and la parole.  When Huisman explained that structuralist studies of narrative are useful, but lack the objective status they had in their heyday, I started to think about how little math I use at my job.

What is the interpretivists orientation good for?  Interdependently discovering truth when there is more than one right answer.

And the positivists orientation? Independently discovering truth when there is one right answer.

Why do we need both?  Sometimes the world is interconnected with a complex grammar.

Introduction

This blog is my personal blog for a university class on transmedia story creation.

Who am I? I’m a computer geek. I’m a lifelong learner. I’m a gamer, but not hardcore. I read mostly non-fiction and watch mostly documentaries. I love a great story (the Count of Monte Cristo) and certainly believe in the power of one.

I have an MBA, but find myself using my listening leadership course lessons the most. I have a BS in computer science, but I only occassionaly write code. I’ve been a web developer most of my life. I learned HTML in 1995 when I was a sophmore in high school. In middle school I learned HyperCard and participated in the broadcasting of morning announcements.

I work at the Joint Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Co-Lab — a Department of Defese research lab focused on prototyping technologies and methodologies that allow for learning without the physical presence of an instructor. I’m interested in both instructional design and technology.

I just completed my first course in instructional systems design in April. I plan to spend considerable time learning about instruction and am still developing my ideas about educational psychology.

I’m interested in the Web, simulations, and video games. I’m an evangelist of wikis — Wikimania 2006 was the best conference I’ve ever attended. I love the Web and the simplicity of producing and consuming multimedia it offers. I’m intrigued by the idea of user generated content in SecondLife. I often think about the difficulty of producing simulations and video games. I believe in the engaging consumption simulations and video games offer — the Games, Learning, and Society conference was the second best conference I ever attended.

I spent a couple of years working with distributed simulations before joining the co-lab in 2003. I simulated important airplanes in U.S. Army training exercises when they were too expensive to fly over the desert of California.  I’ve always loved the simplicity of the Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) standard.