Discuss a role of “storytelling” in your course project. Post your writing here:
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Discuss a role of “storytelling” in your course project. Post your writing here:
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Although my project is not about “storytelling,” I can easily see it being applied through a similar medium presented in the SPOT reading. My project is about tactile augment reality and the educational advantages it offers over existing technologies (such as computers) and existing objects with emphasis on learning by doing coupled with conceptual instruction. This tactile virtual world could represent a limitless number of objects and allow for limitless creativity situations or stories. The technology that I am developing augments the existing environment. An imaginable situation might be children wearing the tactile gloves and augmented glasses and pretending that they are on an epic quest in their parents bed room. They are both fighting a virtual dragon on top of the bed. They are armed with shields and swords that they can feel and are physically running around swinging their virtual swords at the evil dragon. The children could perhaps view the episode of them slaying the dragon to their friends via a wireless link to their computer.
My project is very closely aligned to storytelling in a multimodal way. The program is conceptually designed to allow students to construct their own “stories” through a variety of media. These “stories” can be the narrative of self or can be a story of responses to school assignments or materials.
The Cassell reading with links between storytelling and literacy resonated with me in thinking about my project. She describes the importance of storytelling in developing writing skills and highlights the role that play and storytelling have in regards to emergent literacies. I imagine my project as allowing for virtual play and storytelling to aid in students development of multiliteracies and skills using and semiotically decoding media.
Cassell also highlights the role of writing for peers, which is emphasized in my project; the virtual space is specifically designed for students to be sharing with peers, either in their own class or across geographies. As students construct their online multimodal narratives, it is with a peer in mind. In this, students are afforded the luxury of some potential assumptions (they may assume that a peer in the class will know some of the same local cultural references, etc.) but are still forced to consider the perspective of other readers of their narrative. This will encourage students to be explicit about what they write and to consider how others will read their virtual space.
Cassell writes “children need to author their own personally and culturally meaningful content in a way that is representative of the oral–written emergent literacy continuum, but that focuses them on key aspects of decontextualized language use” (88). This project quite literally allows students to “author their own personality” with the added affordances of many ways in which to communicate and tell that story (music, video, image, text, etc.). It also allows for a greater amount of collaboration with others; once the virtual spaces have been read by others, those others can then author responses. This provides unique opportunities for the original author to see how she/he is conceptualized through the lens of others and can interpret and respond to the other constructions.
My project is the redesign of the iClickr with the incorporation of a game aspect. Although my project is not about “storytelling,” it shares some similar features. For instance, one key feature is that my project allows for students to interact with their peers. According to the Cassell reading, “When two peers collaborate, the simple juxtaposition of their actions allows the peers to modify their understanding of their own actions, through appropriating the perspective of the other peer” (78). My project supports this idea of peer collaboration as my redesigned iClickr allows teachers to have the students get into teams and work together on problems, which are displayed on the iClickr screen. This helps the students to learn from one another and to gain a new understanding of how to solve certain problems. Another similar feature that my project shares with “storytelling” is that there is a form of “play” that helps students learn. In my redesigned iClickr, the form of “play” can be found in the game aspect that the clicker is designed to have.
All in all, my project is not about “storytelling,” but like the technology in the Cassell reading, my project uses technology to enhance collaborative play-like activities to promote better learning.
My project allows students to deconstruct something that already exists in everyday life and to rebuild it as they please. In Cassell’s article, she talks about SLS and its four essential traits. I believe that these four traits would clearly come out with the use of my project, and therefore I believe it would enhance a child’s storytelling ability. To begin, SLS requires oral communication. In my project, ideally, the student would reconstruct their design and would then orally describe it to their teacher. They would explain what they did and why. During their building process they could work alone or in groups, which ties in to another essential trait, peer play. By allowing a child to move around their design they aren’t necessarily limited to a computer, but rather any type of touch pad technology. Since they would be encouraged to describe their work to their teacher this would hit essential trait number four, pertaining to the student creating meaningful content. By allowing the student to create their own creation and talk about it, you have opened up a huge outlet for storytelling and creativity since now they can explain why they did what they did.
In Guha’s article he talks about the degree of control over the technology tool and the three different levels. I believe that my technology would be in the constrained and active levels of control. I think that this would enhance their storytelling experience due to the fact that with the posed questions, and knowing that they have to demonstrate their new creation they will be making up stories. However they still need guidance and direction in order to know which ways to go in their thinking. However, for the most part I think that storytelling plays a huge role in my project. Students not only have to design, but they must decide what they are designing for, and by doing so they create a type of story or narrative to go with it.
In my final project story telling is employed both through words and pictures. While the story telling isn’t a person to person, back and forth sharing of ideas, I feel that story telling can be achieved with just a few words and pictures in an asynchronous fashion. The words the user types set the context and the pictures that comprise the letters create a story around the words.
Looking at a finished piece of text created with the subtext system, I will be possible to look at the pictures and reconstruct a story for how and why those pictures were chosen. In a way, it creates a mental image of the person who created the words and pictures. It is similar to a way that receiving a post card allows us to sense the person who sent it and how we can imagine them in the place that they sent the photo from. I believe that the ability to reconstruct and tell a story to ourselves about the person who created the message makes communication more meaningful and intimate.
Cassell’s discussion of metalanguage also seems relevant to my final project. One of the first art classes I took as an undergrad was a course called “Visual Literacy.” In the class, we looked at various examples of how framing images and structuring scenes can communicate powerful messages. Before taking the class, I had never spent much time thinking about why things look the way they do and after taking the class, I started to see pictures taking on their own language and roles in communication. I feel that the visual literacy course made me aware of the metalanguage of images. One of the motivations for my final project is studying the way pictures and text and foster a meta-visual linguistic sense and how the interplay between words and images can influence communication.
I couldn’t quite remember whether the presenters were supposed to blog the week of their own presentation and sadly, never thought to ask Kimiko before now (6pm on a Sunday). So I will keep this brief.
Storytelling, or rather, the role of teller and listener plays quite heavily in our design concept. With its emphasis on video collaboration and collage space, the course platform forces participants to imagine their virtual and physical audience and peers as they are producing and remixing content. As the content itself is made to be shared and later discussed in a group forum, my hope is that the participants will continually think as to how the artifacts will be viewed and interpreted. Ideally, these interpretation and reinterpretations would help the participants to imagine different concepts, themes, and projects in new ways. The goal would be to collaborate in the way that Cassell imagined when she stated “when peers collaborate, the juxtaposition of their actions allows peers to modify their own actions by appropriating the perspective of another.” This peer-to-peer storytelling combined with audience imagining, will hopefully engender a space where knowledge is produced and enhanced.
I am in the middle of redesigning my course project, taking into consideration the critique I received (which was quite helpful, thanks!), so I will speak to the old version of my project. Just a reminder: it was a method of attaching digital multimodal content (produced on mobile devices) to physical toys (by way of qr codes or some less clumsy technology, like a near field communication chip).
In their article, Guha et al. examine a variety of technologies that “include components to support children’s physical exploration of the world” (2). For their purposes, this means getting away from a computer; the physical world is the world beyond the keyboard and the screen. They also make the distinction between physical storytelling technologies that are physically “predetermined” and those that are “unconstricted.” Predetermined toys include the StoryMat, in which play must occur on the mat; unconstricted technologies like Rosebud and Sage can go anywhere. Both of these, the authors point out, have their particular merits.
My project would be an example of an “unconstricted” toy in the sense that the child could take it anywhere. However, I want to add a third category to the authors’ analysis of space. If “unconstricted” toys can go where the child can go, we need a term to describe toys that go where the child cannot go–toys that are more spatially unconstrained than children. Most toys are like this; they can get lost and found, sent and received. They can go on odysseys. (This is the charm of the Toy Story movies.) My project, by allowing toys to link to GPS devices, would allow for the construction of a map of the toy’s physical movement over space. Such a toy may be a useful way of getting children to think beyond the small scale of everyday existence.
Adults might also benefit from this sort of geographical awareness. Imagine if our household objects (our toasters, our televisions) recorded the paths they took to get into our lives. Even better–what if the parts constituting these objects recorded their varied but ultimately intersecting geo-spatial paths? Such a record would be a partial map of the astonishingly intricate (and usually invisible) supply chains that form our global economy.
My project attempts to enable hacking of dominant narratives/stories that form the boundaries within which we conceive and produce work at school or the workplace. I am intrigued by creative work in particular because there is already some inversion of popular narratives around how good ideas are produced within creative endeavors as opposed to more normative work. For example, we don’t hear the “fail often” suggestion often at work or school, or the advice to have a level of detachment to first set of ideas, or to displaying for feedback unfinished/unperfected work. From this somewhat disrupted space of creative work, I would like to use critical design objects to provoke alternative stories about how time works (for example) for that person, how it might slow down, be amenable to recycling, may stop, speed up, or exist as spaces to swim in, with past, present, and future flowing in all directions, or how ideas live and exist in relation to others, what does borrowing or copying mean, where do our ideas of perfectionism come from, what does it comprise of, and how can we subvert it for our own creative process?
As a result of reading the ‘storytelling’ articles my final project may result in an increased ability to practice storytelling. I could also imagine that my final project allows students to read the landscape and decontextualize an ecological language to practice an ecological literacy. Cassell describes literacy as “… the ability to make meaning for others across space and time (77).” My course project will help create tools for ecological literacy. Storytelling is understanding the structure and function (84). The language of an ecological environment might be noticing and having the ability to name the trees, rocks, fish, and noticing the sun is setting. However, understanding more of the invisible relationships and functions these individual elements have with one another is something experts have gained through study and understanding. Perhaps through storytelling, learners could test out stories that allow for playful exploration and building up fo being able to see the landscape with ecological literacy lenses.
The twitter-like feed would provide breadcrumbs of information that could be pieced together to understand a certain thread. These observations of nature can allow for peer to peer interaction. The students can construct scenarios as well as consume other student’s findings. An example, might be the students looking for moss that grows on the north side of the rocks. Being able to be ecologically literate, one must first understand the cardinal directions. Second they must be able to see the patterns of moss growth on the rocks. By possibly giving the language and showing the ecological patterns, the students can start to tell stories of how they understand their environment. Storytelling would be a natural and safe way to hypothesize which the class and add to the story or post pictures or other resources to the class that can show other story lines.
If ‘expert’ opinions about the landscape were encoded into the twitter-like feed, this could also match Sam from Castlemate, which could allow for a “Vygotskian more capable peer (Vygotsky, 1978), seeming to push children to act at the top of their individual abilities through the nature of their social interactions (99).” Or understanding that “children learn through their participation in activities that are slightly beyond their competence, with the assistance of adults or more skilled children (92).” My final project will look to provide participatory tools that can help students learn ecological literacy.
As I read Cassell (2004) and Guha et al. (2007), I found myself wondering how their principles of learning through storytelling could be applied to older students. Cassell, for example, emphasizes how oral storytelling can act as a “bootstrap” to written literacy – would this not also, perhaps, apply to middle and high school students struggling with written and read literacy? The peer component to storytelling present in most of the models outlined in Cassell and Guha’s models would also benefit older students, as would the construction rather than “consumption” of mental representations. I was also drawn to Guha’s delineation of “open-ended,” “selection level,” and “closed-ended” storytelling tasks, and immediately began considering how similar levels of scaffolding, providing ZPD-appropriate levels of “constriction” could be provided in my own design model. I’ll review how I imagine some of the above principles working in my “virtual book club” reading response module for adolescents:
1. Oral storytelling as a bootstrap for literacy: I could include storytelling as one of the “modes” of response for the student’s chosen (or class) novel. In this module, students could tell their own stories that are related to themes, characters, settings, or events in the novels. For English language learners, this may act as oral language and vocabulary development practice, especially if supports for explicit connections to vocabulary in the text was provided. Also, I hypothesize that such storytelling would ignite prior knowledge in a way that would improve the quality of later written textual analysis.
2. Interaction with peers for storytelling: I was quite taken by the different ways of interacting that some of the storytelling toys provoked, like the chain of stories created by Renga users. In order to make sure that students in my virtual book club not only enjoyed the social aspect of the system for its own sake but “help[ed] each other by modeling, assisting, directing, tutoring, negotiating, affirming, and contradicting each other in literacy activities,” I could design different ways for students to respond to their classmates’ creations (Cassell, p. 78). When students respond, they could have a choice of “adding to,” (in which they could actually extend the creation with one of their own) “critiquing,” or “praising” each other’s work.
3. Levels of constriction: As mentioned in Guha et al., some students will be just fine with very open-ended levels of reader-response, while other students may need much more closed-ended or selection level tasks at the outset. Many methods of reading-response will be suggested by the platform, with additional supports under each tab for that method. For example, “making a video” will have genre support, examples, and tech resources to help students get started, and the technical component might ideally be integrated with the software. Students would be encouraged to try different methods of responses through the teacher challenge system, and open-ended responses would also be encouraged and praised.
A remaining question: How can storytelling, for older children, improve disciplinary literacy, which is so important in the current era? Can storytelling actually improve disciplinary reading and writing skills? In what way?
My idea is the site to help teachers find, adapt and deliver content so that it helps develop the students’ creative thinking skills. One of the most valuable critiques I received during the mid term presentation of my project, was to narrow it down to a subject and an age group. Depending on the subject I choose to focus on, the role of storytelling would vary.
In any case though, the element of the project in which storytelling can be incorporated to, would be the sharing platform. The platform could be designed to foster the development of stories by students. Initially, the idea was for the platform to enable the processes of students sharing and commenting on their peers’ creations, but depending on the focus of the site, the sharing platform could also help students turn those comments into stories, or collaborate on one single story based on what they learned in the class, or require them to tell a story based on whatever they came up with during the lesson to help them work on recontextualization.
Moreover, the site could also help teachers understand the importance of and improve their storytelling skills. They way in which content is delivered makes a difference, and given the goal of the site, being able to incorporate stories in lessons can take students to a different understanding and improve engagement and motivation.
In my Cricket redesign project, storytelling can be incorporated into the higher levels of Cricket kits (in accordance with the redesign, which combines Froebel gift “levels” with the existing kits to create different “levels” of kits). Some examples of how storytelling could be used with a Cricket kit:
– given a story about a user, older kids could design and prototype a solution using a Cricket kit and tell a story about how this solution would fit into the user’s life to help fulfill a need
– younger kids could tell stories about their creations, perhaps in a “show and tell” format, or pair sharing with their friends
In fact, even without explicitly or intentionally including storytelling in the Cricket kits, it is likely that children will develop storytelling interactions naturally. As they create various projects, children will naturally interact with these objects and with each other, and thus develop storytelling skills. Though not intentionally a “storytelling technology” as described in the Guha paper, Cricket creations are physical and interactive objects that lend themselves naturally to storytelling.
Though not about storytelling per se, my project incorporates the element of being a “toy that listens” at an atomic level by giving users feedback on how closely the tones they produce match a standardized inflection. There are many ways this kind of learning could be enriched by storytelling. The toy could teach a child vocabulary in a second language by starting off in their native tongue, and work its way through vocabulary words through scaffolding – teaching the child new words and correcting them as needed. Alternatively, the toy could identify physical objects present nearby, and teach the child corresponding words and how to use them, a la a StoryRoom/real-world Dora the Explorer scenario.
My project includes both a journal blog that uses pre-existing technology from Facebook so that students can tag their friends in their blogs. Cassell explains that “children need to author their own personally and culturally meaningful content in a way that is representative of the oral–written emergent literacy continuum, but that focuses them on key aspects of decontextualized language use” (88). This blog would allow students to develop their writing by analyzing their day, picking out highlights, and thinking creatively. Because this is a public blog rather than a private written journal, students would be writing for their peers and reading each other’s blog entries. Students would also be able to use “metalanguage” because of the photo Scrap Book included in the Tablet. With this photo Scrap Book, students would be able to express their day not only through text, but also through photos and images. With both text and visual images, students can develop creative writing skills and explore new ways of sharing their stories.
A reading theorist, Louise Rosenblatt (1988), described reading as an interaction between the text and the reader which likened how we understand what we read to the composition of a poem. Any understanding of a reading is necessarily a translation of what the writer has scribed and what the reader takes away, a translation which can be termed a ideosyncratic story existing in a third space between the writer and the reader. When the reader desires to get as close to the intended meaning of the author (to share the same story), understanding the writer’s vocabulary is essential; readers commonly get a wildly different meaning, or story, from a reading when they don’t understand the words they read.
The tool I am designing is one component of a larger system intended to help readers translate what they read close to the writer’s intended story by providing a rich body of information about key vocabulary. In response, readers can contribute their own interpretation of the vocabulary to a concept gallery through images, sound, video or their own writing. These contributions are available to all readers, ideally accumulating a rich understanding of how the root reading is ‘seen’ and understood by multiple readers. Clarifying vocabulary brings the reader closer to the writer’s story. Sharing and contributing to the concept gallery brings the writer closer to the reader’s experience. The gallery itself is a concrete artifact celebrating and confirming the nature of reading as a social transaction between readers and writer.