Connecting Ideas, Data, Learners, and Communities through Digital Storytelling

Keynote live session with Todd Taylor, PhD, Adobe Pedagogical Evangelist.

In a recent Tik-Tok Video, Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank fame, says “Since the pandemic hit, the number one demand I have for my companies are people that can take a concept of a business and tell a story about it,” as he explains his very recent shift away from hiring engineers and hiring writers and videographers. What Mr. Wonderful gets right is that these are indeed the days of the rise of the digital storyteller. What he gets wrong is that every discipline, every major, every career, every profession, every culture, and every economy needs digital storytellers who can take complex ideas and concepts and make them stick, and stick together. Data in isolation are inert. Once ideas, concepts, and information are connected through a narrative and put into circulation, increasingly through digital channels, they become knowledge. This talk will tour a wild collection of digital stories across disciplines from astronomy to social work to medicine to show how narratives can connect all of the things.