LEARNING BY OSMOSIS WITH SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE UBIQUITOUS INTERNET OF THINGS
A Columbia Digital Storytelling Lab MOOC participant overview in retrospective
As in many detective stories, there’s the death of someone important who is beloved or hated in the community; the death is dramatic but not so far fetched as it must arouse the empathy of the reader. In my personal retrospective, my first encounter with Mr. Holmes also started with a family tragedy, the death of my father, in my first Saturn passage when I was 15 years old. Although I had always had the reading bug, going to the public library became a necessity in those first few years. I would read everything from one shelf and move on to the next for more. Science Fiction came first with Asimov, Isaac followed by Buck, Pearl and her Chinese tales and then came Christie, Agatha which took me a while to finish as the donations of her books were as vast as her prolific writing career Clarke, Arthur C was next with more amazing sci-fi and then came Doyle, Arthur C with Sherlock Holmes and I knew I was hooked in these two genres. Also, learning the art of the deductive narrative posed a survival mechanism; it helped make sense of reality by structuring my efforts as I started to understand consequences and how they become clues to desired outcomes like in any mystery. Life was an exceptionally big puzzle in those days.
Fast forward 28 years and our paths crossed again in my Saturn return after a divorce, a business merger gone completely wrong and a broken heart which left me thunderstruck. I needed to pick up the pieces of my life but I was clueless as where to begin. James Altucher suggests one reads from 300 to 500 books when we’re going through a re-invention phase and having done it before and recognizing the benefits, I started reading again. One of my readings suggested taking a MOOC and I decided to look at the many offers around and found Columbia’s SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE INTERNET OF THINGS Project/Challenge. I was fascinated by the Project outline: “Through a collaborative process, participants will lay the groundwork for a story world that plays out globally through a series of connected devices that become significant storytelling artifacts” and having done my Master’s Degree in Communication and New Technologies it seemed like the perfect fit. Moreover, Global had tremendous appeal as I was a PHD Candidate in International Relations at the time so it would be a great focus of my professional career in different areas.Nonetheless, participation was not guaranteed as it was made clear that they had limited seats with the number of applicants entering into the thousands from 60+ countries. I submitted my application and forgot about it although Mr. Holmes was definitely a part of my life again with the new BBC series, the recent Hollywood movies and the American series Elementary.
On July 28th, I received Lance Weiler’s email welcoming me to the MOOC and on August 5th I got an invite from Nina Simões , a fellow Brazilian, for a meeting to discuss the project and to introduce me to another participant in São Paulo (Andre Deak). I was extremely excited and also very surprised. I googled them to understand and prepare for the conversation and was very impressed with their experience and accomplishments. I was honored just to be amongst them in the MOOC let alone talking to them. Furthermore, I was extremely surprised they were taking the time to invite participants for a 1 on 1 conference before the MOOC started. I had no idea they would go to such level of care. That was above and beyond expectations. We had 3 Skype conferences, the first one was with Nina and myself, the second one with Lance joined us and the third one Andre also participated. Needless to say, these conversations were amazing, I was immediately in awe of their commitment to the success of the project and could do nothing else but vouch to commit myself wholeheartedly for the next 10 weeks as well.
Still, what took place over the next three months was far bigger than anything I anticipated. #SherlockIoT became at least 20 hours of my week and a daily activity. To cope with each weekly challenge my team had to at least give up either a Saturday or a Sunday to both review the literature (the multitude of support materials and apps which all of us had to engage with) and learn. We participated in forums to share ideas and clarify some issue before delivering the requested reviewed Prototype in time for the 12:59 am deadline on Tuesdays . There were also the Sundays Blab.im live meetings with Lance and the Sherlock team which were life savers as there weeks we were completely lost as to what we were to deliver the following day. Thank God every delivery was considered a work in progress and if you met the deadline you could still review your submission and make changes, and make changes we did. Always. After every submission we could see all the other 21 groups’ submissions and learn by osmosis from what everyone was doing and quickly iterate. It was overwhelming but at the same time it was extremely pleasurable and fun. The quality of the participants and their work challenged us to do better. The commitment, generosity, non-judgmental warmth and professionalism of the Sherlock Team turned us into one big global team and we celebrated each other’s accomplishments and welcomed feedback.
There were many challenges which are inherent to MOOC’s such as that of the group member’s participation. We were 06 members per group but in our case only 3 of us were active and I commend my fellow team mates Ana Alice Gallo and Leticia Magalhaes for their support. We were also joined from the beginning by Christiane Brito a great journalist and storyteller herself who fell in love with the project and walked with us side by side and ERA Transmidia group whose generosity at the final stages of our prototype was pivotal. We, as a group, lacked IoT expertise and although the MOOC provided a very capable IoT mentor, it did not help us because of translation issues. All of the participants of our group were Brazilians and understanding highly technical aspects of IoT in a second language proved very difficult. It is a matter of vocabulary which none one of us had even in Portuguese never mind in English despite us being fluent. For instance, it took us 02 weeks to understand that our object of choice, a Dog’s Leash, had to be researched as a Dog collar to actually integrate IoT because a collar can and has been doing this for some time now whilst a leash has tremendous IoT limitations.
Every week’s prototype was a challenge of scope, either because we were too ambitious and the difficulty was precisely to refine your Object Design to the simplicity of the Internet of Things or because engaging one’s audience in each group’s chosen crime scene, demanded an understanding of empathy and the ideal design of the user’s journey which we lacked until we were actually faced with the New York Film Festival live experiment which was to have a real audience participation.
It was here we faced the last and most obvious challenge: that of the Internet itself. All the planning we made was scrapped down when we had to cope with Internet issues themselves either from the Lincoln Center limitations or ours in Brazil. It did not undermine the fun we and the participants had. According to NYFF’s feedback they had a blast and #SherlockIoT is invited to join again in 2016. Obviously a compliment to the high level and credibility of the project and the Sherlock team.
Our live experiments in Brazil suffered also from technical issues, such as the first time we had power outages which left us in the dark for over 40 minutes and we could not enact a crime scene with the students of Journalism at PUC SP and their capable Academic Coordinator Wladyr Nader. Wladyr was generous to invite us again and we did our crime scene, albeit with a challenging internet connection this time. Still nothing takes the fun away of an audience of nineteen year olds!!!
As we move into 2016 with the expectation of continuing our participation in Sherlock Holmes and the Internet of Things, with the addition of AI to the challenge now, I look back and find that once again Sherlock has helped me through very unusual suspects but a first rate Scotland Yard and many dearest Watsons. Circumstantial deductions allowed me to pick up the pieces and once again find my way into taking charge of writing my own story. I am deeply grateful to what has been one of the best educational experiences I’ve ever had and to the new adventures it has initiated.
The game is indeed afoot!
