Amalia G. Sabiescu

Digital Storytelling as a Whole-Class Learning Activity: Lessons from a Three-Years Project

This paper introduces PoliCultura, a project created by Politecnico di Milano for the Italian schools, which has just completed three years of deployment. Participating classes (with pupils aged between 4 and 18 years) are required to create their own multimedia story, using an authoring-delivery environment (1001stories) provided by Politecnico di Milano. PoliCultura has offered us the opportunity to investigate the prolonged use of digital storytelling authoring tools as a whole-class educational activity in a wide number of real educational settings: approximately 7,620 pupils from 381 classes have been involved in this project since its birth in 2006. From the overall PoliCultura experience and from the wide amount of qualitative and quantitative data collected from participants though online surveys, focus groups, interviews and contextual inquiry activities, we have learned a number of lessons that we discuss in the paper.

Interactive storytelling for children

Since the nineties, storytelling has received increasing attention in the HCI, IDC, and AI communities, exploring the potential of interactivity and multimedia as a means to promote engagement, enjoyment, fun, to foster new forms of childrens creativity, and to increase the educational benefits of traditional storytelling for this target group. The time seems right to look at the field with critical eyes and validate the claims put forward regarding the positive effects of interactive storytelling technology for children, as well as the effectiveness of existing design and evaluation approaches. The purpose of this full-day IDC 2010 workshop is to bring together researchers from a wide spectrum of disciplines who share a common interest in understanding these challenges and to create a research agenda that can orient application and theory in the domain of interactive storytelling for children.

Collective digital storytelling at school: a whole-class interaction

There is a growing interest in the use of collaborative technologies for education. However, their adoption and implementation in formal education is still lagging behind. One feature of cooperative technologies makes them particularly unusable in classroom settings: most tools, environments and interfaces for co-located collaboration are designed to support the interaction of small groups rather than entire classes. This paper proposes ‘collective digital storytelling’ as a way to engage whole classes into activities that provide substantial educational benefits. The paper draws on empirical data from a large-scale digital storytelling project in Italy, in its fourth year of implementation, and examines several aspects and benefits related to the use of digital storytelling in formal education, focusing upon two specific issues: (1) how digital storytelling can engage the whole class, rather than individuals or small groups and (2) how digital storytelling can be integrated in the curricular activities, ...

Involving the Crowd in Future Museum Experience Design

A general trend of museums and cultural heritage institutions besides digitizing their collections is to involve the public more and at various levels. Technology plays an increasingly important role in this involvement. Developments we have observed in museum experience design, include trends towards 1) dialogical engagement of the public; 2) addressing crowds as audiences; 3) the use of Internet of Things (IoT) and Do-It-Yourself (DIY) technology in museums; and 4) designing for museum systems and institutional ecologies instead of for individual museums only. In this one-day workshop we especially focus on exploring the implications of museums reaching out to crowds beyond their local communities, and of museums increasingly becoming part of connected museum systems and large institutional ecosystems. By means of a tangible game we will brainstorm about future opportunities and challenges, cluster and evaluate them, and suggest future work.

Integrating digital storytelling in formal educational settings: a design framework

This article discusses the educational potential of digital storytelling as an emerging research and practice area, and focuses on modalities of bridging the gap between research-based innovation and implementation in formal education. The main argument put forward is that the educational potential of DST can be best exploited by its conceptualisation as an educational activity, aligned to the pedagogical curriculum and designed with a view to reaching specific educational objectives. The feasibility of this position is exemplified by introducing digital storytelling as an educational activity (DSTEA), a framework for the design, implementation and evaluation of DST experiences in formal educational settings. The three main features of DSTEA: 1) alignment to the scholarly curriculum; 2) focus on generation of educational outcomes; 3) co-design involving researchers and school teachers – frame DST as an educational activity customisable to the needs of each pedagogical context, and prone to become part of the structured approach to learning that schools worldwide employ.

Participatory Design for Cultural Representation: A Cultural Transparency Perspective

Participatory design approaches are being increasingly employed for designing digital artefacts and information systems with and for local communities. These cases require a reconceptualization of PD processes to account for widened knowledge gaps between designers and community members, and new patterns of community-defined design goals. In this paper we provide a perspective on the design process that will help designers to better plan their involvement in participatory projects with local communities. Our analytical stance resides on an interpretation of Etienne Wenger’s theory of cultural transparency. Participatory design is analysed as an iterative process of decoding and encoding that involves users/local people and designers having as outcome understanding (through decoding) and representations (through encoding). Cultural transparency, achieved when the two agents advanced sufficient understanding on the other’s practices, is the landmark for effective design. The paper argues for the importance of working towards attainment of cultural transparency in community-based projects, in particular when the goal is to create culturally representative artefacts. Examples of activities and suggestions for advancing cultural transparency in these contexts are provided.

Future museum experience design - crowds, ecosystems and novel technology

The museum world is rapidly changing from being collection-centred to being community-centred and for the public. Apart from broadening access to collections through, for example, digitisation initiatives, new ways of involving the public more meaningfully and at various levels have emerged. Experiences inside museums have become more engaging, by extending the experience beyond the physical visit, or by involving the public in various forms of crowdsourced stewardship of collections. In this book, we explore the design implications that go along with these developments, all concerned with diversifying and making the engagement of the public in museum experiences more rewarding. We focus on the design implications associated with museums reaching out to crowds beyond their local communities, on experimenting with novel technologies and on conceiving experiences embedded in connected museum systems and large institutional ecosystems. By looking at and reflecting on trends, we attempt to sketch a picture of how future museums will change and, particularly, how they will relate to their public as a result of responding to or embracing these trends.

Symbolic narratives and the role of meaning: Encountering technology in South African primary education

This article draws on the results of a long-term, design-based research study with South African primary school teachers to discuss the role of subjectively assigned meanings and symbolisms of technology, as key factors affecting the adoption, appropriation and use of educational technology in urban poor and under-resourced environments. The paper examines how teachers’ engagements with technology are framed, conditioned, and embedded in multi-levelled “technology encounters”. These encounters give rise to meaningful representations of technology that ultimately transform both the teaching and learning process, and culminate in the emergence of “symbolic narratives”: complex assemblages of symbolisms, meanings and interpretations that arise through and therefore come to influence further technology engagements. We argue that a closer examination of teachers’ symbolic narratives can shed light on the motivations that underpin the appropriation, integration -- or conversely, rejection -- of educational technology in urban poor and under-resourced environments.

A Critical Reflection on Three Paradigms in Museum Experience Design

This chapter identifies and describes three technological paradigms in museum experience design, all positioned within an overarching visitor-centredness frame: (1) User-centred experience design, which emphasises modelling experience design in response to visitor views and interests, through methods adapted from or inspired by user-centred approaches in Human–Computer Interaction; (2) Participatory experience design, which shifts the emphasis from the product to the process of design and invites the visitor to become partner in the design of experiences; and (3) Agile experience design, in which the main preoccupation is with being constantly responsive to evolving visitor aims and needs, and innovating the experiential offer on an ongoing basis. In the context of museum experience design, each of these paradigms represents a systematic way of delivering value to the public through meaningfully designed experiences. The chapter contributes a critical reflection on the importance of acknowledging the existence and endorsement of these paradigms, which can impact museum practice beyond single design projects. In particular, I will discuss to what extent working within a certain paradigm can be transformative for the way museums function, how they are organised and how they engage with their public.

The Museum as Ecosystem and Museums in Learning Ecosystems

In this chapter, we suggest that ecological thinking can inform the design of audience-centred and society-relevant learning experiences in museums, with a focus on digital learning. We draw attention to two interrelated perspectives for positioning museum learning experiences: First, their embedding in the museum ecosystem, which includes the collections and spaces, but also museum staff, audiences and the intricate webs of interactions and relationships that underpin the everyday life of the museum. Second, the place of the museum in a broader education ecosystem, which includes formal and informal education providers, learners, as well as other social and institutional actors that shape educational practice. We illustrate this perspective through a case study of a successful long-term partnership between a museum and a technology company for innovating the learning offer for young audiences: The Samsung Digital Discovery Centre at the British Museum. We use a communicative ecologies framework to examine the context and determinants of the Samsung Centre digital learning design approach, how this evolved, and its impacts on the variety of digital interaction patterns that are offered and constantly refined by the Centre. On this basis, we discuss implications for the design of digital learning experiences in museums in increasingly interconnected ecosystems, within and outside museum walls.