Video production: Andrew Kennedy Lewis
A collection of data-informed stories is similar to a collection of data points. According to Elliott Masie, founder of The Learning Consortium, when equipped by technology, storytelling is a powerful tool for learning.
Read the transcript of Masie’s interview below:
A story is an arc. It’s a curve by which you tell a story. This is what you’re doing. You’re interviewing me to get a story. You’re interviewing others. We actually think there’s a huge relationship between storytelling and technology. Right now, if somebody wants to know how something could be fixed, it is highly likely they’re going to end up getting a YouTube video that’s two minutes, eight minutes, 12 minutes long, a story about how to fix it before they go read 112-page manual. And that’s whether they’re at work or whether they’re in their garage. So storytelling fits into that process. We’re going to have to figure out as we build stories, how do we curate those stories digitally? So how do we get at the best story? How do we evaluate them? I would never order anything online if I didn’t see ratings, but regularly I’m asked to watch instructional videos and I haven’t seen the ratings of that.
So storytelling is, to me, an incredible part of it. And it leads to the last part, which is interesting, which is data, because the more that we embrace what storytelling and technology will be in the future, we’re creating data about its effectiveness, but we’re also creating data that if you want to know about a subject, now the system will know your working language, your native language. Are you an engineer? Are you new to this area? Do you like conceptual? Do you like pragmatic? And we’re going to start to see stories we compose through technology to optimize for you the story that gives you what you need.
