
The push for transmedia is bound up with the economic logic of media consolidation. That's why our skill is transmedia navigation - the capacity to seek out, evaluate, and integrate information conveyed across multiple media. No two people will find the same content and so they end up needing to compare notes and pool knowledge with others. They have to weigh the reliability of information that emerges in different contexts. Students have to decide whether what they find belongs to the same story and world as other elements. In a transmedia presentation, students need to actively seek out content through a hunting and gathering process which leads them across multiple media platforms. In a multimedia application, all the readers needs to do is click a mouse and the content comes to them. Multimedia and Transmedia assume very different roles for spectators/consumers/readers. So, for example, the use of the web to extend or annotate television content is transmedia, while the iPad is fostering a return to interest in multimedia. Transmedia refers to the dispersal of those same elements across multiple media platforms. So, for example, an educational cd-rom a decade or so ago might combine text, photographs, sound files, and video files which are accessed through the same interface. Multimedia refers to the integration of multiple modes of expression within a single application. We might understand this in terms of a distinction I make between multimedia and transmedia. Transmedia needs to be understood as a shift in how culture gets produced and consumed, a different way of organizing the dispersal of media content across media platforms. The focus of transmedia navigation offered me a chance to think a bit more deeply about what it might mean for us to produce transmedia education and I thought I would share some of those insights with you. You simply need to sign-up and fill out a short profile to access the schedule of upcoming webinars, as well as links to the archived recordings for previous webinars." " Our Ning site is where our community of educators are exchanging ideas and trying out resources. The Transmedia Navigation discussion involved not only some remarks by me but also a conversation with Clement Chau from Tufts University and Mark Warshaw from the Alchemists who has developed transmedia content for Smallville, Heroes, and Melrose Place, among other properties. The webinars are also available after the fact via podcast. The webinars are open to any and all participants and are drawing educators from all over the world.

This month's focus was on Transmedia Navigation. Each month, they focus on a different skill.

Vanessa Vartabedian is the coordinator who has been running this series.

#Transmedia storytelling examples series#
The series emerges from an Early Adopters Network we are developing with educators in New Hampshire to drill down on the skills we identified in our white paper for the MacArthur Foundation and to think through how teachers in all school subjects and at all levels can draw on them to change how they support the learning of their students. Last week, I participated in one of the ongoing series of webinars for teachers which is being conducted by our Project New Media Literacies team.
