storyfarm.canada

With fall rains come a glorious growth of mushrooms. From one day to the next they burst into the landscape. Each day, every walk, there is new growth, colour, texture and composition.  Storyfarm cultivation has been a very gradual process. I started this blog post on February 9, 2024. It is now November 2, 2024. In early February I was realizing that I needed to change my approach to my situation. I could no longer continue living in a perpetual state of imminent death. Mom had surpassed expectations for two years. She wasn't going anywhere and I needed to shift out of a hospice orientation to a long term orientation. At the same time, I needed to accept the realities and constraints of operating a long-term care bed in my home so that Mom could live out the rest of her natural life at home. This meant I needed to be extra careful about social engagements to reduce the risk of infectious disease, it also meant that my time was essentially proscribed by Mom's need for care twen...

  My approach to storytelling is Incorporating narratology, multimodal theory, new media studies, interactive theory, Internet studies, social media studies, and statistics to produce and disseminate short, concise, blog posts that interweave visual imagery, research knowledge and quotidian anecdotes. This approach is designed to activate multiple points of engagement in the reader, to set up a reading experience that activates the reader's dialogic imagination, their unique interpretation and meaning making of the individual components in the blog post, but also the complex emergence of meaning through the juxtaposition of the different, unfolding parts of the story. Each day I am faced with an impossible complex of requirements, responses, and emerging outcomes. I am looking after my Mom. I am socially and professionally isolated. I am driven to make sense of my experience. I am required to show up every day, every hour, to attend to the needs of my frail elder Mom. I spend the m...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My dog, Adele. How does sharing our experience, strength and hope increase our imaginative capacity and our technological capability? Adele is lying on the bed looking back at me.  Behind Adele, the closet door is open.  Adele on the bed is drawn in black pen.  The closet door is drawn in blue pen. We share our experience, strength and hope so others can benefit from our story. They identify with some or many aspects of our story (belief, value system, history, culture, shared interest, etc.) and make sense of it in relation to their own. This sense-making involves a cognitive mapping process - there are elements of our story that map seamlessly on their internal schematic, other elements may not be an easy fit. I never know what drawing I am going to make or how much I will be able to get done on it. My time is continuously fragmented and interrupted with caregiving Mom. Similarly, as we tell our story and articulate our experience, strength and hope, we are not only tel...

  We continue to develop a manageable storytelling model to build relationships and support for pro-social endeavours. Manageability is key. There cannot be too much work at any of the points of transfer to bring stories to life and pulse them out to interested recipients. Evidence of Activity - this is the results of doing - of making headway, of encountering a problem, of problem solving, and moving (forward, sideways, backward) again. Activity is powered by our beliefs, our values, our interests, our desires. Activity is the result of taking action in some way - talking, creating, re-creating, deconstructing, constructing. Evidence is the capture of activity as tangible artefact - a video, photograph, drawing, notes, diagram, design. Evidence of activity shows others the results of our taking action in pursuit of furthering our investment, it is evidence of broadening our perspectives and deepening our understanding. We share our evidence of activity to let others know what we a...

  BTS - Behind the Scenes Making Of - the story of the making of Many of us are working in a state of 'irrational persistence' to bring our vision of expanding human imaginative capacity to life. We call this state irrational persistence because there is no obvious path to monetize our work, but the importance of the work compels us to make the effort to bring the work to life. A vision to expand human imaginative capacity, by its nature, is not going to fit well-trod paths for capitalization or cashflow. However, our inspiration guiding our irrational persistence indicates the need for us to work to expand our human imaginative capacity. When we share our work in progress, we share the processes of bringing our irrational persistence to fruition. Our sharing, in turn, increases our collective imaginative capacity to implement other's visions of irrational persistence, and, consequently, increase our overall collective capacity to for visioning, imagining, implementing and ...

What is the significance of contemporaneous notes and how can they impact our thoughtful knowing 'the next right thing' to do? We are continuously processing sensations from our perceptions of the world. It doesn't matter if we are asleep or awake, it doesn't matter if we are 'paying attention' or distracted. Our sensations of our experiences are processing below the experiences that specifically come to consciousness. We experience more sensations of the world than we are able to bring to consciousness. What comes to consciousness are experiences that are so impactful that we make the cognitive and mental effort to put those experiences into words - first to ourselves, and later, if warranted, to others. The point is that it takes effort to put our experiences into words, and there are many experiences we process at a subconscious level that don't reach the level of significance to require conscious processing. Contemporaneous note-taking provides a real-ti...

storyfarm.canada is a storytelling initiative that has been in development since 2007. The efficacy of storyfarm's approach was discovered during a literature review investigating mentoring, co-mentoring and distributed leadership. The storyfarm model was tested and proven in a two-year teacher education program from 2007 to 2009. storyfarm.canada applies a theoretical approach drawing from cognitive science, cultural studies and design-based learning. Our cognitive approach to cultural formation and learning is based on the theory of embodied minds. This theory connects our day to day experiences with the formation and re-formation of neural networks and cognition (what we think and how we feel about what we are thinking).  Our cultural approach is based on the idea of social constructivism, that is, our social relationships are in continuous processes of forming and reforming in the context of the kinds of communicative experiences we share, the situations within which these comm...

I never quite know what I am going to wake up to. My work these days is a process of discovery.  My challenge is to maintain consistency with the missions I have committed to completing, while starting new adventures from the confines of my desk, my home and my neighbourhood. Walking the dog in the morning has become a form of meditation, paying attention to the sights and sounds of the present moment. This morning was our first truly warm, sunny day. The neighbourhood was filled with birdsong, many familiar from childhood, heralding the promise of warm spring days ahead. One song called me from blocks away. Adele and I followed it, scanning the tree branches overhead for the source. I knew we were close, we walked slowly looking for the source of this magical sound. Suddenly, it was coming from behind us. I turned slowly, and there, in a lilac bush, I saw this tiny bird perched inside the branches.  Suddenly all things seemed possible. If this beautiful sound could emanate fr...

 

Irrational persistence. I have been working on this concept for many years and now seems to be the time to put it into action. I'm going to start my own story farm. I have to admit to myself before I can admit to the big wide world. The concept is combining Dickens-style serial storytelling with trans media communication. The mission is to tell stories that help us all improve our performance as humans being.

 Each client account produces and distributes content through an online infrastructure of software accounts. These accounts are divided into three functional groups - management, production and social media distribution. This work is designed to be done at remote desks. There is no requirement to attend in-person offices.  Each work desk needs to be equipped with robust internet connectivity and current devices and operating systems.  Each worker needs to have beginner to intermediate citizen developer temperament. There is constant change in the account infrastructure and continuous learning to maintain skill, knowledge and expertise. Work desk equipment and worker temperament are key parts of the critical account infrastructure for transmedia storytelling. Software applications are also part of the critical account infrastructure. These software applications serve several functional purposes: Business, product and project management Business management accounting softwa...