Lisa Gjedde talked on ‘capturing the meaning in interactive storytelling’. There were elements of the project which appealed to me, particularly the thinking of a personal question, then casting the electronic runes and interpreting the resulting video in the light of your own question. However, I won’t be going to any papers by Lisa again.
Spent the morning on a really fun activity. We met up at the Scottish Storytelling Centre in John Know House on the Royal Mile. I was expecting the centre to be a backroom somewhere but it’s an entire, well resourced building about midway up the Royal Mile. Seeing as storytelling in England tends to be confined to the upstairs rooms in pubs or to one-off events, this is even more impressive.
Anyway, we split into three groups and went for storytelling walks along the Royal Mile, taking digital photos as we went. Then we returned to base, shared stories and impressions and made a collage of the experience.
This seemed to tie in very well with Gill’s mobile learning. You can see the possibility for creating a really rich resource about the Royal Mile with different histories and stories and perspectives available at every point. Layer upon layer of different perspectives.
Also it made me think about why some stories/narratives endure. If a major role of narrative in education is to help us to remember things, then which stories help us to remember best? Which elements are the most important? Do we tend to remember things which make us uneasy?
Kirsten Price talked on ‘Narratives in New Zealand schools: a radical experiment’. She introduced an interesting DVD but the links with narratives felt tenuous.
Harry Brenton is at Imperial and talked about ‘teaching dynamic medical processes using medical representations’ which was good but out of my field. Did make me think about how we understand and process information in different ways depending on how it is presented.
Rose Luckin’s paper was ‘When the NINF came home: guiding parents and children in the co-construction of narratives linking home and school learning’. This is based on a project where tablet PCs moved between home and school, giving parents a better idea of what was going on in school. I must say I didn’t warm to it as a project. Perhpas because I’m not convinced of the virtues of getting primary school kids to schlep tablet PCs round with them. Perhaps because I found the interface too irritating, perhaps because it’s pushing the school into the home. I think when you’re at primary school you should be able to switch off and play when you get home, not spend hours going through your day with your parents.
I found it amusing that most of the conference was in the St Trinneans Room at the halls of residence. Turns out it was the real St Trinians on which the cartoons and the films were based! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Trinians
Getting round to blogging more about the NILE conference. Paul Hazel from Swansea asked ‘are we justified in using narrative as a pedagogical tool?’ Paul seemed to be getting at the heart of what the conference was all about. He was one of the few people to define narrative and to consider what that definition meant.
‘Narrative is the primary means of comprehension and expression for our experience of events changing over time. Narrative time is subjective, not objective; elastic not metronomic.’
Polkinghorne (1988) defines narrative as ‘the fundamental scheme for linking individual human actions and events into interrelated aspects of an understandable composite.’
Narrative is a fundamental mode of thought. It is one of our most important means of encoding long-term memory. The organisation entailed in narratives reduces cognitive load. The additional processing necessary may generate new meaning. Narratives allow more efficient retrieval of memories. Narrative is crucial in the establishment and maintenance of personal identity. We use narratives to describe who we are, to describe the past and to predicta nd plan the future.
facts only have meaning in relation to others. They must be contextualised. So all learning relies on narratives.
I took the ipaq out and took a lot of photos. Not necessarily good photos, but photos with a GPS fix. It may be good at latitude and longitude, but it’s lousy at altitude. For some reason, it thinks that this picture was taken at an altitude of 71 metres. It may be a small and blurry picture, but you can see sea level, and it’s definitely not 71 metres down.