Interviewer: In teaching teachers, though, how much do you discuss that balance between facilitating and collaborating? You know, it's not stepping on toes, not leading the narrative, the project, the meaning, but at the same time being a co-collaborator.

Susan Abdulezer: Well, what I do when I teach teachers is I model that process. And I kind of make a point of it too.

Interviewer: Tell us about that.

Susan Abdulezer: I might suggest a theme to the teachers. But I never tell them you do a project on this or that or tell them here's who you will collaborate with. I generally suggest a broad theme. If anybody has an idea outside of that theme, I generally let them use it. But there still has to be some rules in terms of what kinds of things they're going to do and what approaches they're going to take as there are kind of acceptable rules for developing anything of quality in any kind of research. I have the teachers learn some skills, and then introduce a theme, and then the teachers themselves come up with the various kinds of approaches to that theme that they might like to take. It's broad enough so that they can think of it in terms of their own interest and also how the students that they teach might benefit from their learning about these technology approaches and these themes.

And then the teachers have to gather some information. I give them some guidance as to how to story board their information, how to approach those things so that they make some sense, and how to begin to collect information and then some technological considerations like how big those stories need to be. There's always some particular parameters, for example, limiting the disk storage space to 40 megabytes - that sort of thing.

Then they begin to develop their stories and have to bring them back to me so I will coach them in whether I think something is doable or not doable, whether the movie they planned to insert is something that will support their content or not support their content. So, I act more as a coach rather than someone who has dictated an assignment and expects certain results.

And what happens then is that they actually experience a classroom where their own interests are paramount, that there are standards that are expected, but the teacher acts kind of differently than in other kinds of classrooms. And they can take that model back because they're living it. They're experiencing what their students should feel in their own classroom. And I think it's really great when the teachers turn around. They really at a gut level realize it, you know, and then begin to use that in their own classroom.

Interviewer: That makes sense.

Susan Abdulezer: But I don't go through the whole philosophical thing of this is a facilitated classroom, and we're doing some project-based experiential learning.

Interviewer: Right, just by example.

Susan Abdulezer: I don't go through that, I just do it.

Interviewer: People will figure most of that out in the real practice. That if they disarm the student and their voice, then they don't get anything out of the student.

Susan Abdulezer: Absolutely, they'll just get rebellion.

Interviewer: The worlds of interactivity versus linearity, do you talk about that much? I mean, you've done a lot of interactive stuff. Do you talk about design considerations in terms of story?

Susan Abdulezer: We talk a lot about that because the digital environment gives us so many more choices. And most of our relationship with the stories we produce, or narratives or research papers or essays are generally linear. And many of the things we see are. Well, I wouldn't say they're all linear. There are many TV programs where you follow three threads, three story lines throughout an episode. Seinfeld traditionally does that.

For the tools that most people have been given in their lives, which is a pencil and a paper or typewriter, it suggests a linear consideration in how you're going to deliver your ideas. My approach at times is to take an idea and do a little linear consideration of that idea. Then I will turn around and do an interactive consideration of that idea and show how ideas can branch, how to use hyper text, and give examples of those kinds of things.

I think it's really important for kids to handle hypertext easily. At the same time, the power of a linear story is tremendous. I've been sort of combining the linear and interactive storytelling lately in some pretty interesting ways. And I've had some teachers who produced some wonderful things that used some linear movies done in Premiere, that were part of a larger interactive environment. I don't really have them story board because I think story board is still too much connected with a linear type of thinking. I generally don't use the word story board. I have them make interactive maps of their projects. On each frame of their map, they have to include what kinds of media they're going to use, and how they're going to connect it to other parts of their story. I also talk about why they might want to organize the project in this way. There are many different levels of interactivity, and why you might want to branch out, why you might have an image map that has buried information.

I use interactivity based on kid’s needs. If you need to bury sign language in text for the purpose of communicating a story better and honoring that language, that suggests that you have something more interactive rather than linear. That you need access to a second level of syntactical meaning. What I come up with comes out of the kid's need.

Interviewer: Do you talk much about the presentational context, about how you make the human presenting the multimedia artifact into an event itself or this whole idea of story within the story. The story of the maker in contextualizing what they're about to see as a product. Is that addressed?
Susan Abdulezer: We do talk about different ways that these pieces that can be presented depending upon the situation, and sometimes pieces are presented without the maker being present such as on parent-teacher night, there might be a project that a student did that is on the computer. But there's also sometimes gatherings where kids present their ideas as if they were at a conference. And they present ideas to each other as their stories to each other. I've had students who do presentations to other students just without any guidance from the teacher at all. You sort of sit on the side, and let them take over. And I think that's a very important component actually.