This summer, I’m honored to be co-teaching DS106 with my new colleague, Alan Levine. We’re going to be teaching the class entirely online over 10 weeks. In typical DS106-fashion, we’ve invited the Web to participate. The class will be made up of a group of enrolled students at UMW as well as a cohort of open-online participants. We’ve got a lot planned.

First, and foremost, our version of DS106 will be taking place at Camp Magic MacGuffin, a very special summer camp for digital storytelling, creativity, and self-actualization. (I don’t actually know what “self-actualization” means, but it sounds nice.)

In a day or so, we’ll be sending out a welcome letter to our UMW students. Others who interested in participating should check out our welcome video and our special video for open, online students. You can also review the syllabus and packing list. And, if you’re really dying to know more, you can get to know Alan and me better or take a look at the folks who’ll be joining us as camp counselors.

For the duration of camp, I’m going to be blogging my entire experience on a shiny, new site. I’ll be feeding those posts to my Twitter account as well as showing them in my sidebar.

See you on the other side of the mountain!

UMW is featured in this month’s Seven Things You Should Know Series by ELI focusing on Navigating the New Learning Ecosystem. What’s interesting is that this is not the first time UMW has been featured in the 7 Things series, in fact it’s the fourth time since 2009. We were featured in the article on PLEs, WordPress, and MOOCs —and that is certainly cool and I am excited and all that. But what confounds me is whenever UMW staff and faculty submit presentations to ELI’s annual conference we seem to be on the pay-no-mind list. If we’re the innovators ELI seems to regularly have said we are again and again for the last three years—and I think we are all that and more—then start showing us a little love.

UMW is kicking major ass in the Instructional Technology field right now—and has been for years, no circling the drain here—and the Domain of One’s Own is going to turn it all up to eleven. If you want to spotlight a university CIO right now, turn your eyes to UMW’s Justin Webb who has the vision and willingness to experiment with all this and actually make it happen at Mary Washington. Is ELI looking for a Rookie of the Year instructional technologist? Get a load of the work Tim Owens has done to bring the pieces for a domain of one’s own together for this to be a more than just a dream—all this while balancing live video streaming on the cheap and makerbot madness! There is a new Sheriff in town when it comes to instructional technologies, and her name is UMW’s DTLT. RESPECT OUR AUTHORITAY!

Culpeper, Virginia. The camera slowly pans up exposing a very small man-made body of water and a grid of square and rectangular box-shapes made of concrete. A concave wall of windows is set back within each box. Text fades up on the screen that reads “Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation – Library of Congress” George Willeman is on screen talking about the first films ever made – “all these people who worked on these things are all gone now, but they have left behind these amazing shadows for us to enjoy.”

This is a scene early on in the film “These Amazing Shadows: The Movies That Make America“. Documentarians Paul Mariano and Kurt Norton intersperse film clips and interviews as well as archival footage dating back to the silent era to contextualize the films that were made and why they are important to our culture. Each year 25 films are added to the National Film Registry (part of the Library of Congress) which are deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant films”.

The fact that the Packard Campus is just 40 minutes away in Culpeper is a film buffs dream. Each month they put together a film schedule that includes some classic films. Some are on the Registry, some are not. The movies are free, you just need to make a reservation to get a seat. I know, you’re jealous. I understand. What is even better than that is “These Amazing Shadows” in on Netflix instant watch (as well as on DVD), and it’s a great film to watch and get more suggestions of movies to put on your Netflix queue.

The passion with which the archivists do their jobs restoring the films is compelling. The excitement with which the featured actors and directors talk about film discoveries will inspire you to see lots of movies. James Billington, the Librarian of Congress will be your new hero. I can’t recommend “These Amazing Shadows” enough.

. . . for MS that is. For those of you who don’t know, every year in early June (sometimes it’s been late May) I do the Central Virginia MS Ride. It starts in Richmond, Va. and ends in Williamsburg, Va. after a 75 mile ride. Then the next day, it’s back to Richmond. This will be my 14th ride since moving here from upstate NY (my first ride was back in June of ’99 on my mountain bike). I ride for a guy named Bruce Lowery, who actually is recovering from a nasty bout with an infection in the ICU of the local hospital. It wasn’t directly related to his MS, but it was made more difficult, and life threatening.

So on June 2nd I’ll be on the bike again supporting Bruce. His wife Pam who works at UMW as well, turns into a dynamo for this event. She works one of the rest stops, providing hydration and food the riders. I’m always amazed to see how hard she works and I know she’ll be dripping with sweat again this year, and she doesn’t even ride!

Anyway, this is the part where I once again ask you for help. Go to my donation page and contribute what you can. Hey the DS106 Kickstarted project is over and I know you have some money again burning a hole in your pocket. I know I, as well as Pam and Bruce, will truly appreciate it!

Hey, I’ve even gone to the trouble to provide you with an easy to remember URL if you’re at a computer and don’t have this post handy.

Go here and pledge:

http://bit.ly/msrideandyrush

What does this mean? It means we’ll be providing personal domain names and web hosting for anywhere from 200-4000 students that will be used in a series of courses over the the coming year. This is born out of the idea that we want to help students consider taking responsibility for their online identity, as well as explorE the implications of what it might mean for them to take control of their work and manage their own portfolios (howe ver we understand that term). The idea that we can do this in partnership with the Department of Information Technology (DoIT) just reinforces how important giving students control over their online identity is at UMW. What’s more, none of this could have even been considered on such a scale without Justin Webb’s support and understanding of just how important this is to the evolution of UMW’s vision of teaching, learning and instructional technologies.

What’s more, if this pilot is successful we’ll be considering giving every incoming Freshman in the 2013/2014 academic year their own domain and webhost to experiment with. So this emerging pilot is the test run for a much bigger and more radical approach to make students nodes within a larger network of the intellectual community that in many ways would transform UMW Blogs into a framework not unlike ds106′s site for a variety of classes, communities, etc.

Now this is exciting!

I feel like I just finished a sprint, the race is still going but we’ve already won. I had no earthly imaginations that when I drafted yesterday’s post about our DS106 Kickstarter project I’d be able to write an update saying we were fully funded just 24 hours later (19 hours actually). What has happened is a true testament to the power of the community and the commitment to keep this thing not only alive but strong. To build and grow and connect in new and greater ways. You all kick some serious ass.

I should also take a moment to mention the large number of “unknowns” out there. It seemed like every 15-30 minutes we’d throw out a name of a recent donor to see if anyone knew who they were. I expected the DS106 community to step up (and they went above and beyond), but I never could have imagined that strangers who believe in what we’re doing would come forward to give generously.

Before we began this I was excited to see what was going to happen, to analyze to death the stats, the momentum, the psychology of donors, all of it. Perhaps it’s a bit tacky to talk about this stuff before it’s over, but I think the last 24 hours represents a pivotal moment for the campaign so I wanted to break out some of those stats while they’re fresh.

When Jim and I began brainstorming reward tiers and how to price things we planned on a graph that would look very much like the one above. The t-shirt was going to be the most popular item and although we originally had the calendar at $25 and the shirt at $50 we decided to swap those two. Because of that I assumed we’d have a high number of t-shirt orders, but lower numbers of the higher tiers. What did throw me off was how strong the $50 and $100 tiers are. We were conservative in our estimates but you all have blown those away. At the moment the average donation is $48.78

Social media has played a huge role in the momentum of this campaign. $2,421 of the total given so far was backed as a result of people who came from Twitter alone, making up a little over 40% of donations pledged. Facebook, Google Plus, and a few blogs made much smaller marks with 1-3 donations each. Another notable driver appears to be the Chronicle article, which has brought 18 donations making up 10% of the total money earned. Press never hurts in a Kickstarter campaign but I had more expected folks from the Chronicle article to tell others rather than directly donate.

So where do we go from here? We have 16 days remaining on our Kickstarter campaign. In hindsight we may have made that length too long (or maybe our goal was too small?) but at the time it made sense to give folks on a biweekly pay schedule some time to come up with money for a donation. Jim and I have talked a bit about what we could do if the campaign continues to bring in new donations. At the time of this writing we’re already almost $2,000 over our initial goal so some of those dreams will become realities.

The DS106 Radio server is just one opportunity. That has been funded in part from the telethon we held last fall, but I have no doubt Grant Potter may be footing much of that project still. It will be great to give him the money to run it for the next year, and maybe build on it with some new and interesting developments. Imagine if we hired someone to develop iOS and Android apps to broadcast directly to DS106radio bypassing any need to put settings in. iOS users comfortable in Papaya are used to this, but Android users are still left a bit in the dark and for both sets of users there is a long list of settings to get that going. Just one possibility.

Heck, speaking of mobile apps what about a mobile app for DS106? What would that look like? Could we develop a fluid way to view digital storytelling work that feels like Flipboard?

Another area of DS106 that sorely needs attention is the whole process of signing up and getting fed into the site. We use FeedWordpress and Buddypress in conjunction to build that community architecture, but the two don’t play together and setting it up is a manual process that we could pay a developer to make more seamless. And of course those kinds of things benefit not just DS106 but the larger open online community of learners because we can open source those changes and help build a better framework for running these types of courses.

I know Jim has a lot of amazing ideas for what’s possible and will likely blog about them soon, but all this is to say to those that have given “You guys are amazing, incredible, generous, and kind people” and for those still deciding if it’s necessary “Yes, we can use you to do some incredible stuff in the next year. Your donation would not be a waste.” The last 24 hours has been a wild ride and I’m blessed beyond belief to get to play along with you all. Thank you thank you thank you. Let’s keep making art and magic.

A few weeks ago over lunch Jim Groom mentioned to me that Zach Davis had moved DS106 to its own server space. On at least three occasions in the past semester it had capped bandwidth usage and it was often having fits of its own being in a shared hosting environment with the rest of Jim’s smaller sites. It was time for DS106 to graduate to a dedicated server, and Zach Davis did an amazing job of making that transition to a cloud-based server seamless. Unfortunately it came with a cost of almost $3,000. For anyone that runs their own server it’s probably right in line with a normal hosting cost for something as big as DS106 has gotten (it comes out to around $250/month). But it was certainly a cost that Jim wasn’t going to be able to bear on his own. Reaching out to certain departments and resources within UMW was one option, but funding is tight and we’re all lucky to have jobs with benefits. $3,000 for a single course website could have been a tough sell for an administrator. I had another idea, and it’s never been done before.

I’ve always wanted to do a Kickstarter project as I’ve watched that space grow in the past year or two. Their focus on music, art, design, and technology limits the avenues that I or we as a group could participate. But I wondered if perhaps this wasn’t the perfect test of the model: a crowd-funded course community of digital storytellers. Certainly we all played a part of building what DS106 has become. Could we all play a small part towards the success of something greater. I’m stoked to find out. Our Kickstarter page is live as of this morning and it’s the result of much preparation and planning. A balance between covering the costs for DS106 for the next year and also printing and making some great things to ship out to people in the process we’ve set out a goal of $4,200. We were honored to have Giulia Forsythe make some amazing artwork for the limited edition t-shirt, which I already think will be the most popular item. But I also think we’ve approached some of the rewards in a creative way where it might entice folks to think about carving out their own space on the web. It’s going to be fun to watch it progress.

We’ve got 18 days to raise the funds. If we don’t meet the goal by the deadline we’ve set (April 16th) no one will owe us anything and we’ll try something different. If we go above and beyond the initial funding we will be able to do some really incredible things by paying for development of the code that powers DS106 and the WordPress framework that feeds everything in. In reality you’re not just contributing to DS106, you’re playing a part in building an alternative model for open online communities and courses that can and will extend far beyond what we’ve done thus far. To say that the office has been abuzz as of late is a bit of an understatement. We’re excited to finally get this off the ground and give people an opportunity to join together towards this common goal. Now quit reading my blog and go grab your reward. Let’s make art…and history.

Image credit: Kate Geraets "We Rock" (click image for link)

The semester has been flying by, here we are in week 10, two-thirds through and I have to say we here at UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies are moving at a pretty amazing clip. It’s as if everything has clicked, and we all “can still jack in and know what do to.” It’s like a team that just starts to hit their stride, and when they do it all just feels so natural. A beautiful sense of peaking where everything around you slows down  and you can just see what’s coming next, and nail it. Working at UMW’s DTLT right now is a rare professional privilege, and I find myself racing to work everyday to ride that high. But all of this might just sound like sugar coated cheerleading, so let me layout what exactly has got me so excited about working at DTLT right now.

UMW’s Online Learning Initiative
Steve Greenlaw is leading up an initiative at UMW that I think is one-of-kind when it comes to online learning. UMW’s Online Learning Initiative, amongst other things, is trying to organize and formalize some of the amazing digitally-based work happening at UMW into the foundation for an approach to teaching fully online courses across the disciplines by focusing on bringing the principles of a liberal arts education to web-based learning, i.e., interaction, community, self-directed-learning, intimacy, etc. We believe that University of Mary Washington is in a unique position to design and teach courses which instill the values of a liberal arts & sciences experience into a fully online environment that are at least comparable quality to our traditional face-to-face courses—and that’s what we’re doing.

Along with Steve,  Martha Burtis, myself, and just recently Alan Levine (but more on him in a bit) are working with a cohort of nine faculty to get at least eight fully online courses up and running this Summer and Fall. It’s extremely exciting, and the approach is in many ways groundbreaking—for the most part these are not just online courses, they are courses that are on and of the web and that for me is where the excitement comes in.

Additionally, the actual process for proposing courses, reviewing those proposals, and sharing ideas and commentary has been happening on a series of sites Martha Burtis designed that are nothing short of amazing. Last Summer, the faculty involved were asked to consider in-depth the value system of a liberal arts community. We then started exploring how these values might be integrated into the online courses they were developing to avoid the all too common problem of trying to graft the face-to-face on the online space.  Their final course proposals  were based around a series of core liberal arts values (you can see the Liberal Arts values I keep referring to here) we were all in agreement on and then each proposal was reviewed by two internal reviewers, one UMW student, and two external reviewers .

The review process was streamlined by Martha’s submission site for proposals here, as well as the ultimate reviewing  and commenting site that was done in digress.it for commentary and feedback for each of the course proposals. You can see two examples of these course reviews here and here. Finally, she has come up with a site that allows the faculty from UMW, and beyond, to share quick teaching ideas with one another based on the core values of UMW’s Online Learning Initiative, it has the potential to be an absolutely amazing resource for sharing ideas around teaching in general, but teaching online specifically. (You can see the repository of teaching ideas here.) The long and the short of the OLI is this: a lot of universities and colleges have gone at online learning as cost saving, convenient, efficiencies for the university (all of which we know we can provide well) —what we are interested in experimenting with in the OLI are the interfacing of the technology and people at UMW to actually make online courses social, interactive, and intimate spaces for teaching, learning, and sharing that augment the face-to-face experience at UMW—and further coalesce the community.

Domain of One’s Own Rebooted

If the OLI wasn’t enough, we also have a project that is near and dear to my heart building some serious steam on campus. Tim Owens came on board in July, and he has been batting about .450 every since. He’s a machine. He single-handedly re-invigorated the group around the Domain of One’s Own project and has owned it since, and if all goes well we’ll be committing to a pilot for this Summer and Fall that will provide anywhere from 200-400 students with a web host and domain of their own for the entirety of the next academic year and beyond (with sites on the whole Freshman class for 2013). Let me say that again, if all goes well we will be committing to a pilot for this Summer and Fall that will provide anywhere from 200-400 students with a web host and domain of their own for the entirety of the next academic year and beyond. How sick is that? What’s more, it will have specific curricular and departmental hooks around campus and across disciplines. It’s not a done deal yet, but just the idea that we are even this close to such a concept becoming a reality on campus is an absolute coup in my mind.

Alan Levine
Oh yeah, and by the way, Alan Levine is now an instructional technologist at UMW. Let me say that again, Alan Levine is now an instructional technologist at UMW! Are you kidding me? How sick is that?! We are rich as kings, and can you imagine being a student at UMW and having Alan Levine coming in to talk to you about using WordPress for a portfolio? —or working with a professor to imagine the possibilities for Digital Storytelling or a PirateBox? —or you name it….it’s an absolute dream come true for me to be able to work so closely with Alan, and I know for a fact I am not alone in this sentiment.

A New Media Shop

Andy Rush has taken a lot of shit from us for years for being the New Media guy here at UMW—what is “New Media” again we constantly ask? But as usual his deceptive searching for his flow and rhythm is purely cover for setting the standard and direction for the group. Not only did he turn us on to the video kit and the initial possibilities for live streaming that Tim Owens ran with for DTLT Today (you remember that quiant little site?), but he’s now collaborating with Alan Levine on top notch video projects like this, developing comprehensive and brilliant resources for our students to navigate the complex work of digital media like working with digital audio and video. He’s got all of us excited about the new Final Cut Pro, and he’s producing regular resources like this awesome guide to ripping, shrinking, and copying DVDs. En fuego.

Canvas
Oh yeah, did I fail to mention we moved to Instructure’s Canvas as our institutional LMS this year as well? If I failed to mention it, it’s because Lisa Ames has been so amazing at running this transition and seeing to it that our faculty are happy with this new system that we basically introduced overnight as our previous Online Learning Coordinator and LMS administrator took off two weeks befor the migration. A Herculean task that provides yet another source of stability and service on UMW’s campus that allows so much of the innovation to thrive.

UMW’s Website on WordPress
One more thing, before I forget, UMW’s website is now running entirely on WordPress. It is a multi-network setup, and the whole thing is beautiful. It was all possible by the brilliant work of Cathy Derecki and Curtiss Grymala, and this process deserves a whole series of posts and discussions, but one quick thing to take away from: as a result of Cathy and Curtiss’s work we are contributing directly to the WordPress community as state workers. This idea of building the commons as part of our jobs is coming to fruition more and more everyday at UMW, and it is an amazing thing.

And I just know there’s more, but this post is too long already

Some of my favorite features shown off in the video:

Content-Aware Move Tool

This is the real mind-bending one. Draw a selection around an object and move it and you no longer get a white background where the object used to be. It will use the surrounding content to automatically fill in the area that it used to be. It looks futuristic and it’s awesome!

Enhanced Video Editing

iMovie has always been my preferred video-editing tool but Windows users are usually left to poor tools unless they pay. Obviously Photoshop isn’t free but if you grab this beta you’ll be getting a much better video editing tool. It can split clips, add transitions, audio layers, and you can even use text and image layers and manipulate them in the video just as you would with a still image (something that even iMovie doesn’t offer). It’s no replacement for a full-featured video editing solution like Premier or Final Cut but as an additional feature of a great image editor it’s awesome.

Speed and Performance

After just a half-hour of playing with it I can already tell they’ve squashed a bunch of bugs and really streamlined performance of the software. It’s fast, fairly stable for a beta, and doesn’t have that legacy bloated software feeling that previous versions of Photoshop have had. On newer computers it will take advantage of the extra horsepower your CPU and video card are packing.

For DS106 folks who are struggling to find good tools this would be a great (albeit somewhat temporary) solution to play around with a full-featured product. There are no limitations in the trial other than the fact that at some point the trial will expire (likely when the software goes on sale).

I. The Rise & Fall of Mike Daisey

Like a lot of other people, I’ve been thinking a lot about the recent revelation that Mike Daisey’s January piece Apple’s suppliers’ factories in China on This American Life contained some serious lies and fabrications. I listened to the original broadcast in January and was horrified by the descriptions of working conditions at technology factories in China. It definitely moved me as a story of greed and our culture’s obsession with consumption. And it made me think quite a lot about my own role in this (as well as the responsibility of companies like Apple to monitor working conditions and wages of their suppliers’ employees.)

This Monday, I listened to the podcast of the most recent TAL episode, in which Ira Glass confronts Mike Daisey about the lies he told. It’s painful to listen to. Daisey comes up with rationalization after rationalization for why he did what he did. At times he seems in physical pain as he tries to navigate the conversational waters and survive the interrogation.

The one rationalization that Daisey seems most drawn to is that the lies he told were justified because of the ends they served: his story was meant to inspire audiences to Think Different about their consumption of the latest gadget or technology gizmo. It was supposed to awaken our consciences, forcing us to confront (as I did) our own roles in this system. It was supposed to haunt us, and, hopefully inspire change. It’s worth mentioning that if this was the main purpose of Daisey’s piece (and the monologue from which it is derived), he was terribly successful. MANY people were effected by the TAL episode (it is the most-downloaded episode episode of the most popular podcast in the iTunes store). In inspired additional press coverage, some with Daisey (during which appearances he repeated the lies he told). It seems to have prompted Apple to release even more information about their auditing of factory conditions. The primary factory that Daisey dealt with in the piece, Foxconn, hired a heavy-hitting PR agent to handle the press coverage and backlash after the show aired. and over 200K people have signed a petition on change.org.

During the retraction show, Daisey mentions how the ends of his story justify the means several times:

I think I was terrified that if I untied these things, that the work,
that I know is really good, and tells a story, that does these really great things for 15
making people care, that it would come apart in a way where, where it would ruin
everything.

and

…everything I have done in making this monologue for the
theater has been toward that end – to make people care. I’m not going to say that I
didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard. But I stand behind the work.

and

I stand by it as a theatrical work. I stand by how it makes people see and care about the situation that’s happening there

And from his blog:

Especially galling is how many are gleefully eager to dance on my grave expressly so they can return to ignoring everything about the circumstances under which their devices are made. Given the tone, you would think I had fabulated an elaborate hoax, filled with astonishing horrors that no one had ever seen before.

Except that we all know that isn’t true.

There is nothing in this controversy that contests the facts in my work about the nature of Chinese manufacturing. Nothing. I think we all know if there was, Ira would have brought it up.

You certainly don’t need to listen to me. Read the New York Times reporting. Listen to the NPR piece that ran just last week in which workers at an iPad plant go on record saying the plant was inspected by Apple just hours before it exploded, and that the inspection lasted all of ten minutes.

If you think this story is bigger than that story, something is wrong with your priorities.

Daisey has dug deep into the rationalization that the larger story of corruption and abuse at these factories far outweighs the lies he told in that story.

What’s deeply sad and ironic is that there IS a lot of truth in Daisey’s story. It is NOT a complete fabrication. He had a great story before he added the lies. His message, because it IS based in a terrible truth, is in-and-of-itself terribly compelling. But, in the name of a BETTER story, he devalued and undermined the real story he had.

II. KONY-ization

I had never heard of Joseph Kony before a few weeks ago. His name first appeared in my Facebook feed, when one or two friends shared the KONY2012 video. I had also seen mention of it on Twitter that morning, and so I took 30 minutes out of my morning and watched the video.

My reaction to the video felt schizophrenic. On a deep emotional level, I was moved by the stories and voices of Kony’s victims. The stories are horrific; the voices are deeply compelling. This reaction was obviously shaped by the incredible production values and the slick storytelling that the video employs. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth watching just to reflect upon the use of rhetoric, media, and storytelling for advocacy. It is hard to watch and NOT feel moved.

But, at the same time, that slickness also felt deeply manipulative. I knew I was being “shaped” by the video. I knew that the reactions I was having were programmed to happen. I wasn’t used to advocacy making me feel quite this way. I wasn’t sure if my feeling manipulated was actually a sign of my own cynicism. Was I too jaded to sympathize? Was I letting this reaction intervene in the deep empathy that I was also feeling?

It was uncomfortable, because what I WANTED was to just feel for these people and, as a result, DO something. And I’m sure that’s the reaction that the creators of the video were going for. But the production was getting in the way.

There’s a human story behind KONY2012 (and in the larger work of Invisible Children), that should need no slick video in order to be told. As people, the horror of that story should be enough. Period. But, the makers of the video emphasize that the story wasn’t getting out enough.

It wasn’t enough.

They needed to employ the tools of Hollywood in order to get our attention. And, did I mention, I’d never heard of Kony until I saw this video?

I did further reading about Invisible Children and Joseph Kony. And it didn’t take long to find the critiques. (And, to their credit, IC responded thoughtfully to many of those critiques.) The criticism doesn’t accuse the video of telling lies, per say, or fabricating the stories. Instead, it’s rooted, in part, in a belief that IC drastically over-simplifies the story that is being told. And that they shape that story tremendously with Hollywood-style storytelling techniques. Others, apparently, felt manipulated, too.

III. Storytelling for Good

Both the Daisey and the Kony episodes seem to me to be rooted in similar practices: shaping and molding, and even fabricating, stories in order to serve a higher purpose.

The context of these stories matters tremendously. Others have noted that Daisey’s real sin was not in lying or fabricating or “shaping” a story, but when he allowed that story to be retold on a show that is, for the most part, a journalistic endeavor. (It’s worth also noting, as others have, that TAL regularly airs works of fiction–which are generally labeled as such–and works of “loose” memoir, such as David Sedaris’ Santaland Diaries–which are not.) Daisey, himself, admits that letting his work air on TAL was the biggest mistake he made.

KONY2012 doesn’t pretend to be journalism. It is blatant advocacy, and it relies on the passion of the crowd and the value of word-of-mouth recommendations to spread.

But, both pieces, serve to tell a story in order to raise awareness and spark action. They seek to inspire us, and not just the way any good story might inspire. Rather, they seek to inspire us so that we want to become witnesses to change.

I can’t decide if telling a story for this purpose should drive you to a higher standard — or if it buys you a space of grace in which you can tell small lies, shape narratives, and beg your audience’s forgiveness because you believe that what matters is not the telling of the story itself, but what the story creates in our hearts and minds when it is told.

IV. A disclaimer

Lest it’s not obvious, I do understand that there are differences between what Daisey did and what KONY2012 does. I don’t believe that anyone has accused the makers of the latter of telling any outright lies in the video. But I still feel like there is a deep connection here about our expectations with regards to narrative and advocacy.