TEDx Transmedia Conference – An Inspiration

I recently had the great pleasure of attending the TEDx Transmedia conference hosted by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) in Geneva, Switzerland. TEDx are an offshoot of the famous TED talks of “ideas worth sharing”. Transmedia is a method of storytelling that extends the storyworld into the real world, where the audience participate and can affect the outcome of the story. The conference aimed to encourage an atmosphere of creative risk-taking and opened with this rather wonderful short film.

The good and the great of the transmedia world were there, if not speaking then in the audience. Highlights for me included the passionate and heartfelt presentations by gurus Stephen Dinehart and Jeff Gomez, the amazing work Christopher Sandberg has been involved in, including the Conspiracy for Good with Heroes creator Tim Kring, and meeting and chatting to other creatives from around the world.

We await the first speaker

I found the delegates as interesting and inspiring as the speakers; a mixture of television and film people, games developers, writers, app and web developers, entrepreneurs and more. I thought I might be a bit of an oddity with my learning technologies background however the people I met were intrigued and interested in our (LearningAge Solutions) work, particularly the transmedia style learning projects we’ve undertaken.

I was again struck by how similar transmedia is to blended and social learning. Transmedia projects follow similar processes and face similar challenges in engaging with the audience. There are a few people using transmedia for learning purposes, however most projects so far have been designed to teach people about the energy crisis or global warming and had huge budgets. I am convinced that with creativity and the right tools engaging and immersive transmedia experiences can be created for other learning applications with much smaller budgets.

Some great ideas being generated over dinner

With this in mind I suggested to those I met that we undertake a transmedia project as a learning experience for us all. Before I knew it (over a few post conference drinks) I had nine people signed up for the project including some of the global leading lights in transmedia. I’m really excited by this collaboration and the direction it could take our work. I’ll be blogging about it as we progress, so watch this space.