Handout 3 King, Workshop Online: “Social Media Learning,” http://socmedlearn.blogspot.com/ Linköping University, Sweden, 29-30 March 2011 transmedia storytelling for transdisciplinary knowledges under academic restructuring Katie King, Women's Studies, University of Maryland, College Park/Email: katking@umd.edu Home Page: http://katiekin.weebly.com/ Twitter: @katkingumd; in Second Life: Katie Fenstalker

References: • Gomez, J. (2008) “What is transmedia?” Starlight Runner Entertainment. Available online at:

http://starlightrunner.com/transmedia • Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where old and new media collide. NYU. • King, K. (2009). “You are not the author anymore.” Available online at: http://notauthor.blogspot.com/ • Klein, J. T. (2004). “Disciplinary origins and differences.” Fenner Conference on the Environment, Canberra, 24-25 May.

Available online at: http://www.science.org.au/events/fenner/klein.htm • McGonigal, J. (2011) Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better. Penguin • Quest to Learn [School in NYC] (2009) See website online at: http://q2l.org/ • Slaughter, S. and Leslie, L. L. (1997). Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University. Johns Hopkins. • Traweek, S. (2000) “Faultlines.” In Doing Science + Culture, pp. 21-48. Routledge. POLITICAL ECONOMY AND INTERESTING QUESTIONS (Traweek 2000: 23) “I have become interested in how these massive shifts in political economy affect the kinds of questions intellectuals begin to find interesting at such periods, the kinds of resources amassed to investigate their questions, the kinds of curricular and pedagogical changes generated, and the new modes of investigation. That is, what else is going on when there is a change in what counts as a good question, an interesting mode of inquiry, way of teaching and learning, and the infrastructure needed for pursuing these emerging forms of knowledge making? Who resists these changes; how do they resist?” ACADEMIC CAPITALISM (Slaughter, Leslie 1997: 9, 12-3) “By using academic capitalism as our central concept, we define the reality of the nascent environment of public research universities, an environment full of contradictions, in which faculty and professional staff expend their human capital stocks increasingly in competitive situations. In these situations, university employees are employed simultaneously by the public sector and are increasingly autonomous from it. They are academics who act as capitalists from within the public sector; they are state-subsidized entrepreneurs. // Movement toward academic capitalism is far from uniform; indeed, it is characterized by unevenness. Even within the English-speaking countries, there exists a continuum on this dimension, with Canadian academics probably least involved with the market and U.S. academics probably most involved…. higher education in the United Kingdom and Australia has moved rapidly toward the market, the United Kingdom in the mid 1980s, Australia in the late 1980s.” TRANSMEDIA (Gomez, CEO Starlight Runner Entertainment 2008): "Deep media, persistent narrative, immersive storytelling, transmedia: right now, we are experiencing a moment of radical technological change, with seismic shifts in the way that entertainment is conceived, produced and distributed.... Transmedia storytelling is storytelling by a number of decentralized authors who share and create content for distribution across multiple forms of media. Transmedia immerses an audience in a story’s universe through a number of dispersed entry points, providing a comprehensive and coordinated experience of a complex story.... Transmedia narrative is the technique of conveying messages, concepts and themes to a mass audience through systemic and concerted use of multiple media platforms. The implementation is designed to engage audience members individually, validating their involvement and positively reinforcing personal participation in the narrative. The result is intense loyalty, long-term engagement and a desire to share the experience." MULTI-, INTER-, AND TRANS-DISCIPLINARY KNOWLEDGES; KNOWLEDGE WORLDS (Klein, 2004, online) “Multidisciplinary approaches add more knowledge to the mix rather than single, separate perspectives. They juxtapose different perspectives, although they speak as separate voices, so their alignment is encyclopaedic. “…It differs, however, from interdisciplinary interaction, which involves a conscious integration that may take any number of forms. Interdisciplinary approaches consciously integrate separate data, methods, tools, concepts, perspectives, theories to create a holistic view or a common understanding of a complex issue, question or problem.

“Transmedia storytelling refers to a new aesthetic that has emerged in response to media convergence – one that places new demands on consumers and depends on the active participation of knowledge communities. Transmedia storytelling is the art of world making. To fully experience any fictional world, consumers must assume the role of hunters and gatherers, chasing down bits of the story across media channels, comparing notes with each other via online discussion groups, and collaborating to ensure that everyone who invests time and effort will come away with a richer entertainment experience.” (Jenkins 2006: 20-1)

“Note, though, that the purpose often differs. 'Instrumental’, 'strategic', and 'pragmatic' forms of interdisciplinary differ from 'critical' and 'reflexive' forms. One of the strong forces propelling interdisciplinarity these days, particularly in national research funding, emerged in the 1970s and 1980s when industrialised nations found themselves falling behind in international economic competition in areas of manufacturing, computers, biomedicine, and the medical sciences. These initiatives focus on social, technological and economic problems. They differ from culture-based forms of interdisciplinary investigation and environmental campaigns. “The third term I wanted to put on the table is 'transdisciplinary'. All three terms date from 1970. The typology of multi-, inter- and transdisciplinarity evolved from a conference in 1970 that the OECD had in France, the first international conference on the problems of teaching and research in universities. At the time, transdisciplinarity was defined as a kind of comprehensive framework that tries to go beyond combining existing disciplinary approaches in an interdisciplinary fashion to create new frameworks, new overarching syntheses. General systems theory has been one of the most important ones, along with policy sciences, feminism, ecology. “More recently, particularly in Europe and Latin America, a new meaning of transdisciplinarity has emerged…going beyond not only disciplinary boundaries but the boundaries of the academy with society and involving multiple stakeholders. This meaning has been strongly clear in the evolution of environmental work. “…The languages of describing knowledge have changed in kind. The older keywords of description for knowledge and education were dominated by images of boundary formation and maintenance, expertise and mastery and control. That process still goes on in 'disciplining' knowledge into segmented, fragmented, and even isolated fields that were presumed to develop in a linear fashion with normative social values and homogeneity. “Today, though, descriptions of disciplines, professions, and knowledge in general have changed. The current keywords are boundary crossing and blurring, integration and collaboration and cooperation, and interdependence in an environment characterised by complexity, nonlinearity and heterogeneity, and a trans-sectorality associated with the term ‘transdisciplinarity.’ “Ultimately, our common project…is to create robust knowledge, knowledge that draws on traditional canons of rigour and reliable knowledge but is also socially robust. I borrow the concept of robust knowledge from Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons' work, Re-thinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty. Robustness is a relational concept borrowed from engineering…. The challenge for us today is to create robust knowledge that factors not only multiple disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledges but lay knowledges and indigenous knowledges in arriving at sustainable solutions.” POSTHUMANITIES AND GLOBAL ACADEMIC RESTRUCTURING (King 2009: http://notauthor.blogspot.com) “• Having to address many diverging audiences simultaneously • Having to author knowledges as merely one of multiple agencies with very limited control In the nineties television had to learn not only to “show” but also to “tell,” in forms newly interactive and participatory. It accomplished this in not altogether voluntary partnership with the web, and, beyond that, in activated partnerships with assertive fans, un-black-boxing educators and intellectual entrepreneurs who took jobs of “reception” seriously and practiced them in detail. It became necessary to both show and tell, in new divisions of hyperlinking labor. Multiple products that expanded sensory ranges for commercial reasons were also tasked with hyperlinking responsibilities in embedded and immersive layers among cascading infrastructures. Reenactments became a particular way to both show and tell, reenactors a kind of communication technology themselves, scaled both as persons, and also as moveable elements in immersive seas of actants now eddying among knowledge worlds. Reenactment melodramas demonstrated transdisciplinary knowledge practices such as speaking with things as well as the affects and ethics of sifting through and managing authoritative and alternative knowledges in a posthumanities. The boundary work of pitting cultural criticism, or a set of “best” educator practices, in any simple way against the liveliness of commercial exuberance, or the enjoyment of popular comforts and pleasures – as in refusing television or enlisting in negative critique – became moot. Academic capitalism made only too explicit what was already historically a complexly interwoven and multi-systemic layering of public infrastructures for education and entertainment.” QUEST TO LEARN SCHOOL IN NYC, CREATED BY GAME DESIGNER KATIE SALEN & OTHERS “Quest to Learn is a school for digital kids. It is a community where students learn to see the world as composed of many different kinds of systems. It is a place to play, invent, grow, and explore.” INTRINSIC REWARDS, NEUROBIOLOGY, GAME DESIGN (McGonigal 2011, kindle location 821) “…from a neurological and physiological point of view, ‘intrinsic reward’ is really just another way of describing the emotional payoffs we get by stimulating our internal happiness systems. By undertaking a difficult challenge…we an produce in our bodies a rush of adrenaline, the excitement hormone that makes us feel confident, energetic, and highly motivated. By accomplishing something that is very hard for us…our brains release a potent cocktail of norepinephrine, epinephrine, and dopamine. These three neurochemicals in combination make us feel satisfied, proud, and highly aroused. When we make someone else laugh or smile, our brain is floded with dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and reward.”