The Story in Stories Past

I’m currently picking my way through Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future there are many ideas in this book (a future blog will be a review) but it made me think about how much has changed in last fifteen years, and how Stories Past developed.

We started from an episodic story Stoney Grove which debuted in March 1998. It ran through three seasons, and is the story of an Englishman and an American women who meet, win the lottery, buy a ‘great’ house in England and finally fall in love. We did three seasons and concluded with a live interactive wedding. The site used multiple narrative techniques – emails, diaries, newspapers, direct chat and letters (it was the old days!). It also used dynamic html to present the story.

From this site we created an education module. Students were asked to explore a version of the house and try and discover the who, what and where – who lived there, when they lived there, what was happening to the family, and what was happening in the world at that time. We were completely naïve when it came with working with schools and, though we did have some great feedback from a number of students who used it, we never were able to go “commercial.”

So we took the ideas and techniques we’d developed went to museums and archaeology programs and said, let us do this for you using your content. Since then keeping up with the technology changes is a constant challenge but the range of what we can do now is extraordinary. If you can describe what you want, we can find a way of doing it. But our approach is informed by some of the ideas we had when creating Stoney Grove: learning works best when it’s contextual, some (though not all) students learn more from an active/interactive learning style, and that a good module is exploratory and non-linear.

If you’ve got a few hours Stoney Grove is still online!

National Park Service - wonderful places, wonderful things

The National Park Service consists not only of wonderful places; it also manages the objects and artifacts that those places possess. Working through a co-operative agreement between the National Park Service and the University of Tennessee, I’ve been leading a project to redevelop the current web catalog site, and work with parks to increase the number of items on the site.

The scope of the collections is extraordinary; more than 42 million objects including archeology, art, history, and ethnography objects, biology, paleontology, geology specimens, and historic photographs. Currently only a small percentage is available online, and graduate students at UT have been helping add records and images.

We imagine a number of different audiences coming to the site: students and educators, researchers and park visitors. We expect they’ll come with questions about the Civil War, about specific park collections, about the household belongings of John Adams, and many, many more.

The challenge is to create a site that answers the questions of a researcher looking at maritime history, as well as the casual visitor curious about the history of the Florida parks. It’s about seeing the objects not just as individual things but as part of a park, a collection, a historic theme, or an aspect of the rich cultural and bio-diversity of the United States.

The site will be available to the public in late summer.

Failing to Learn – More Games and Gee

Filament games http://www.filamentgames.com/ created some educational video games, working with James Gee, author of Video Games are good for your soul (see previous blog).
Argument Wars, http://www.icivics.org/games/argument-wars, looks at legal cases. It must have been a challenging design concept. Computers aren’t good at parsing language, and this could have been a bad multiple choice game. But, by presenting possible arguments through a hand of cards, and asking players to decide which to play, and when, it make you pick a strategy. I think the cards could have been made a little more complex (larger hands, different types of cards: argument, support, evidence), but the game works, and is informative and fun.
I also liked Energy City. The first time I played I crashed and burned, but repeated play let me get more successful. It’s one of the things in their philosophy statement “Good games embrace experimentation and, by extension, failure.” It seems, with the dogged insistence on GPA that the education system at present doesn’t allow “good” kids to fail. Yet we all know that we can learn more from failure than success. By working within a framework, allowing exploration and replay we can get better – and in this case maybe learn to save the planet.

And a headline like this http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110202/ts_yblog_thelookout/tree-octopus-is-latest-evidence-the-internet-is-making-kids-dumb-says-group needs to be challenged and discussed (as indeed the reporters do!)