Parallax Learning and Creative Contingency Plans by Renne Emiko Brock

Editor's Notes

1. Welcome to Parallax Learning and Creative Contingency Plans! Thank you for joining us today!
2. I am Renne Emiko Brock and you might know me as Zinnia Zauber as well. I am an artist, instructor, and superhero. I am a professor of Multimedia Communications at Peninsula College in Port Angeles, Washington, USA. Here’s a link to my department http://pencol.edu/proftech/multimedia-communications You can find me and my work at a couple different places: http://uniqueasyou.com/ facebook.com/RenneEmiko @renneemiko facebook.com/ZinniaZauber Presentation will be at https://www.slideshare.net/renneemiko Please visit my sim to learn more about my work at “hue are you?” slurl.com/secondlife/Brauni/180/0/22/ Or, get my book… Here is the direct link: https://amzn.to/2ZQqsno
3. Don’t Panic! “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams is a launch manual preparing multimedia students to approach, brainstorm, and problem solve from various points of view and audience perspectives.
4. Parallax learning encourages a strategic empathic approach and formulated, growth mindset. Yep, that is me in GREEN with Douglas Adams!
5. I still have my game! I have my students play this interactive fiction. Very few get out of the bedroom. Aiming for an apparent position or solution, students use multi-dimensional virtual scenarios to devise creative contingency plans appearing to be precognition. Do you know where your towel is?
6. With Covid-19 and stay safe orders, we have been totally online since April 13, 2020. The whole college works together to send encouragement to our amazing students.
7. We shifted to Zoom sessions instead of meeting on campus. All students got to experience Second Life through shared screens.
8. Sharing screens and personal stories became supportive learning opportunities. My students made this time of tragedy into a time to help others.
9. As my textbook, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, teaches students to thrive in awesome, chaotic experiences and learn new things while they persevere and question the meaning of life. It predicts technology way ahead of its time and validates the responsibility creators must consider when they unleash such power and ingenious transmedia influence.
10. What is Parallax Learning? The technique called parallax in astronomy is a way to measure distance of stars through motion or location of observer’s different viewpoints.
11. Consider a parallax learning approach as changing perspective or viewpoint to a problem to gain ideal outcome. I am a multimedia sculptor, so I have to view my pieces of art from many angles. I get on the floor to be sure everything looks right from all angles.
12. Here’s a Parallax Demo You can experience this parallax measurement and perspective by extending your arm to hold out your hand with a finger or thumb. Arrange yourself to cover an object in the background. Then switch between your left and right eye being open and shut. You will see you your finger or thumb are appearing to shift slightly on the background. If you know the distance between your eyes, you can calculate the distance to your finger. Don’t worry there is not a geometry quiz at the end of this presentation.
13. Creative Contingency Plans are future circumstances that are possible and not totally predictable. My parents were scientists and my dad especially was a logistics engineer and system science professor. I explain to my students that I couldn’t borrow the car unless I could explain three possible routes home to my parents. This is the contingency plan from Vancouver Mall, WA to my home along Whipple Creek. I give students creative route challenges to solve before they can start some assignments.
14. Knowing where your towel is. The H2G2 says, “A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.” Devise practical and fantastical towel lessons for absorbing imagination that are inclusive and empathic. They are not easy and require some deep thought and personal expression.
15. Transformational success and gaining a growth mindset happens when all six of these supportive and explorative elements are found in your educational adventure. With these, students can take flight.
16. Without agency, resistance takes a stand. Without vision, you experience confusion.
17. Without incentives, you gain resentment. Without skills, anxiety forms and grows.
18. Without resources, frustration fills the void. Without a strategy, debilitation halts all action.
19. Let’s start with agency
20. Advocate Accommodations.  While teaching and working in virtual worlds is not always accessible to all students due to lack of access to robust internet access and higher performing computers, it does provide accommodation equity to those who can participate inworld.
21. I have been teaching online and inworld for over 13 years. Peninsula College has provided degrees in Multimedia Communications online even longer and is available to a global audience. We have diverse students from age 15 to 92 in our courses. While achieving full accessibility isn’t easy, we do our best to accommodate learning environments to be inclusive and respectful.
22. Many of my students require accommodations due injuries, disabilities, and other impediments like veterans with PTSD, being a caregiver for an elder family member, being a parent of young children, and attending class in public places because that is their only access to internet due to homelessness.
23. Removing barriers for education, interaction, and expression is not limited to physical obstacles. Offering assistive technology, devising adaptations and modifications to course delivery systems, and creating student centered intentional planning is vital for accessibility and achievement.
24. Embrace Flow! Our brains improve through pleasure. Flow is the state of complete absorption while in a challenging task. When you are immersed in creativity in action, you get into creative flow. Flow is when time stops. Flow happens when your expertise shines. Flow merges imagination and authenticity. Flow requires personal control or agency over the task. Flow is when you are in a state of oneness or wholeness.
25. Here is a "Flow Chart" to show how the Challenge and Skill levels create areas of experience. Apathy happens when a task requires low challenge and low skill levels. Flow happens when the task is challenging and your best skills are activated.
26. Please embrace these concepts of Flow: Focus Do that one thing. Devote complete concentration on the task at hand. Watch your time, your motivation might get lost in flow. Freedom Feel free and safe to express yourself. No self judgement. Trust yourself. Feedback We require engagement and clarity of goals. Assessment and evaluation guides improvement and that is a reward. Participation is enjoyable. Feeling Do something that is intrinsically rewarding. Enjoy when awareness and actions are united. Challenge yourself.
27. Now on to vision!
28. Give them a map! Try to provide different forms of direction to plan ahead and understand required outcomes. I don’t spell out everything for my students, I am not that great of as speller. So, I use logic charts and maps.
29. Communicate directly. Don’t get lost in translation. It is kinder and more efficient to speak the truth. Students use Five Word Feedback for classmates’ weekly essays. Both English professors and students hate it.
30. Provide them an idea of their place in the plan. Demonstrate where they belong and will be contributing. Have Second Breakfast! Be welcoming and embrace Hobbit hospitality!
31. Use parallax perspective and empathy to foster dreams. Create opportunities to build personal connections and teams to support each other. Dreams are goals then plans to be realized. Zack helped build his classmates virtual gallery. He was an IT student, not a multimedia student, and wanted this class be an opportunity to show off his creative side. All IT students have to take this class with me. They all say they hated it and that it changed their lives.
32. Next we have incentives!
33. Require Ownership. Everything a student creates should be theirs and that ownership establishes respect. Class Side Quests become business plans that go from virtual to actual.
34. Provide Coupon Codes. I don't do extra credit, I do coupons codes that are much harder. Things are not always as they seem. “May I ask why you felt little Tiffany deserved to die?” – Zed, Men in Black
35. Little Tiffany and the simple test from “Men in Black” was added to our Psychology Area of Study Scene to go along with Penguin’s other H.R. Giger / “Aliens” inspired artwork and the Psy professor’s favorite movie franchise. “Little Tiffany” became code for several classes meaning “You need to look deeper.”
36. Let students learn from their own lessons. Provide room for students to teach themselves and make something just for their own elation and expertise. Have them teach their classmates what they learned. This snapshot is a student showing how they built their nebulas for their new shop.
37. Let’s check out skills!
38. Embrace adventure over anxiety. My Interaction of Color in Design students struggled with using their cameras and engaging during class. Each week, we picked a theme color and they had to dress, show art, or surround themselves in that color. The results were epic and quite wiggy!
39. Improve communication and rally with problem solving. I teach my students to ask a lot of questions while creating a safe and inspiring space for collaboration. This requires active listening, sincere curiosity, gift giving, and perseverance. My students produce media projects, which include videos, graphic design, websites, and marketing campaigns, for local businesses, military and government agencies, educational and nonprofit organizations.
40. Even when something is difficult, we embrace the positives of an opportunity. Confusion and disappointment can generate an unexpected reward: Hours of profound discussions about professionalism and persistence during my class that built a stronger trust among the classmates and with me.
41. Use imagination. “…the secret is to bang those rocks together guys…” Any chance to create, take it! My students participate in different exhibitions across the grid.
42. Here we are at resources!
43. Use humor and laugh at yourself. Using a “KHAAAAAAAAAAN!” yell is good for you too. When people were not following the mask mandates, I would ask ¿Quién es Más Macho? Ricardo Montalban, Khan, of course!
44. Share Small Joys and Make Tiny Allies! The Elves! You know this soundtrack became your jam. Pick a theme song for yourself and sing it! Mine is the muzak version of “The Girl from Ipanema”. What’s yours?
45. Crisis Circumstances require awareness, care, understanding, and offering of a hot beverage. My students focused on connecting students with our C.A.R.E. Team to help support students in crisis even when they were as well. Frank Herbert, author of Dune, is from Washington, so we like to quote him, “Fear is the mind-killer.”
46. And, finally we are at strategy!
47. In my courses, we use Creative Production Systems to explore and foster inquiry before developing solutions and creating content. Purpose / Discover to define what the reasoning of the project, the end goal, and call to action. Knowledge / Document to ask questions, do research, and curate gathered content. Skills / Design to create and explore to express action and communicate goals.
48. Tasks / Develop to make the work and devise different versions. Criteria for Success / Deploy to execute the requirements in action and design. Look twice before you leap. Feedback / Update to gain positive and productive feedback. Give yourself time for reflection and refine the work. Include in this process to build Creative Contingency Plans to be adaptive and appear to omni-dimensional.
49. I like to front load information to students that can be somewhat overwhelming. This preparing for all contingencies and may appear to be precognition to others. At the same time, I trust my students and encourage agency in their learning and producing. I remind them that I am a Gen Xer, I will not handhold or micromanage.
50. Gamer Growth Mindset It could be the roll of the dice or the Heart of Gold Infinite Improbability Drive that generates that idea of accepting uncertainty. Yet, accepting the impossible is possible to make the ordinary extraordinary makes the creative mind the Dungeon Master of any game. There is freedom in a growth mindset and there is infinite opportunity and inclusion when it becomes a gamer mindset.
51. Celebrate Transformation Student Lifecycle Success! “We will be restoring normality just as soon we are sure what normal is anyway.” – Trillian, H2G2
52. Okay! Superhero Capes or Super Towels? How could you create towel lessons to inspire your students to embrace parallax learning?
53. Towel Lesson: Make a towel, superhero cape, or another object customized just for them. This requires personal reflection and research skills. Maybe some poetry writing.
54. Towel Lesson: Provide a safe place for them to call home that they help design or decorate. The bypass destruction and feeling lost in the universe provides new, inventive insight.
55. Towel Lesson: Provide challenges that they can solve for others and work together. Learning to build a team you trust means you can go to the end of the universe and back. If you please visit my “Don’t Panic!” VWBPE exhibition, you will discover over 150 one of a kind towels I made for my students.
56. Okay, here is the lighting round of H2G2 learning ideas! Agency Advocate Accommodations. Embrace Flow. vision Give them a map and communicate directly! Provide them an idea of their place in the plan. Use parallax perspective and empathy to foster dreams. Incentives Require Ownership. Provide Coupon Codes. Let students learn from their own lessons.
57. skills Embrace adventure over anxiety. Improve communication and rally with problem solving. Use Imagination. resources Use humor and laugh at yourself. Share Small Joys and Make Tiny Allies! Crisis Circumstances require awareness, care, understanding, and offering of a hot beverage. strategy Use Systems and Creative Contingency Plans to be productive and adaptive. Gamer Growth Mindset. Celebrate Transformation Student Lifecycle Success!
58. Please consider using Parallax Learning, Creative Contingency Plans, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to discover, measure, and brighten those luminous scholar stars!
59. This last slide is to honor my Peninsula College student Rachel who returned after 8 years to take my three Digital Storytelling courses. This is her towel! She is awesome and I am very proud of her! Thank you very much! #besuper #PenColMedia #42 I am Zinnia Zauber / Renne Emiko Brock and this has been a pleasure to share with you my work and successes of my students! My main website is http://uniqueasyou.com/ Presentation will be at https://www.slideshare.net/renneemiko  
60. Copyright 2021 by Renne Emiko Brock. All Rights Reserved. uniqueasyou.com hueareyou.com