Flat+Stanley+Collaberative+Project

=**Flat Stanley Collaborative Project**= Flat Stanley is based on a series of adventure books by Jeff Brown starting in 1964. Stanley was pressed flat in a freak bulletin board mishap. As a result he was able to go on adventures by traveling through the mail in an envelope. The book series began its life online with the Flat Stanley Project in 2001. Here, groups can take Stanley on adventures and then post pictures on the website. For this assignment,each student in EDT 6010 represented a "class."

Skills Learned or Expanded
The Flat Stanley Project was a good refresher exercised. Most of the skills required I have performed using high end professional technology. Much of this work took place at Rowan University and SIUC in the mid 1990's. Back then, it required professional grade hardware and software to accomplish much of what was done in this project. The big difference is that all of the programs used to create this project was done with free online software available to everyone.

Link to Flat Stanley Goes to the Car Wash

Link to Flat Stanley Collaborative Project

Reflection
This project would work for just about any grade level. The only difference would be expectations placed on the students doing the project. This would be a great field trip assignment. Younger kids could keep it relatively simple with few pictures and simple captions. It would be interesting to see what a creative writing class could do to stretch the tale of Flat Stanley - perhaps a 20 picture graphic novel.

Flat Stanley works because it continues to be relevant. His form has changed, but the concept is still alive in modern media. AT&T uses a stuffed monkey stowed away in the briefcase of a business man. The man takes pictures of the monkey throughout the trip on his camera phone and e-mails them to his daughter.

Another huge example of the Flat Stanley concept is the Roaming Gnome. It started in the 80's in Sydney, Australia and has been a popular fraternity prank ever since. The prank involves kidnapping a yard gnome, take it on crazy adventures complete with pictures, and concludes with the safe return with the pictures. It became so popular, the website Travelocity adopted the Roaming Gnome as its mascot.

The difficult part of the assignment was finding good weather for outdoor photography. The week of the assignment included 4 days of rain, 3 days of extremely high wind and Thanksgiving. Flat Stanley Goes to the Car Wash was idea number four.