Thinking about OEB26 Workshop with @rogeroverall

Roger Overall (in the photo) and I are thinking about conducting a hands-on workshop during OEB26 in Berlin. It would be AI just with your phone.

We want to keep the human at the heart of an AI-assisted storytelling process by leveraging best techniques of mobile journalism and authentic storytelling. The workshop would start with a creative framework that Roger Overall uses when teaching small businesses how to write well. Then I would borrow some of Brigit Kolen’s work to shows how to maintain authenticity and empathy while repurposing original ideas with multimodal AI tools.

I’ve done this sort of thing before by weaving an authoring method into a framework that embellishes human creativity while using large language models.

We will need to figure out how to seat up to 40 people around circular tables and then have them form groups of three or four people. We will show how to extract transformative information buried inside the OEB26 conference material and in a set of online assets about December in Berlin. The small groups would produce outlines, storyboards, and multimedia content suitable for sharing on social networks.

We have five hours in this workshop to show how to find and validate anchor text, storylines, and compelling hooks. As well as to learn how AI on a phone can transform those text plugs into presentations, videos, and multimodal content.

There is pedagogy (and podagogy) supporting this workshop. A series of short training modules, interspersed with gamified competitions between teams seated in the round at their tables, help everyone discover thoughtful prompt sequences and better workflow design patterns. The workshop's peer learning dimension keeps the "human in the middle" as participants refine, improve, and validate AI-generated outputs.

Before we start and after we finish, all of our training material enjoys licensing as Open Education Resources. We believe that will ensure our workshop's framework supports transparency, sustainability, and equity of access in educational contexts--especially for OEB attendees that visit from places that do not receive generous funding from their governments. We hope everyone can finish our workshop with a deep appreciation of maintaining the narrative value of the human voice in their teaching.

So it's off to plan seven workshop demonstrations that people can access as interactive books. Then we need to specify six hands-on tasks that ensure participants know how to (1) extract compelling stories from five disparate data sets and (2) leverage AI when cross-referencing information, when creating slide decks, and when making multimedia content.

I'll update this post with information about the teams that earns top prize for quality content and accurate responses during our OEB26 pre-conference workshop.

[Several of the images were snapped during a storytelling workshop conducted by Brigit Kolen and Bernie Goldbach during ICERI25. The OEB26 workshop uses different pedagogy.]