This is a pretty interesting video tool from HBO. It’s an interactive 3d framework that shows a story from 4 distinct perspectives. Each one gives you a different amount of information. In order to really understand what’s going on you have to see the story from these different perspectives and then combine the results into a “big picture” kind of understanding. You can watch two perspectives at the same time, which is interesting1.
The key here is that you can’t understand the full story from just one of the views. It really takes some processing to figure these stories out in their entirety.
It extrapolates nicely to the idea of perspective in terms of personal bias, both historically and in writing2. Questions like . . .
- How does perspective change a story?
- How does perspective impact history?
- Can you write a narrative without perspective?
There are ton of stories to browse through. They’re short but some, of the few, I’ve been through would be questionable for some classrooms.
Lots of possibilities for student projects on perspective branching off of this using text, images or video.
This is fascinating. I am always looking for ways to get my students to go deeper with the idea of multiple perspectives, and this site would be fun for them to explore. It seems like the emphasis is really now on examples with the viewer not having all the information, and then it is like solving a mystery, in which case there is one right answer at the end. I wonder if there are examples that get closer to situations where there isn’t such a neat resolution?
Thanks for sharing this.