Piet Kommers

Woven Stories as a Cognitive Tool

Woven Stories is a web-based application that allows users to compose their stories, and link appropriate story sections with pre-existing sections authored by someone else. As a co-authoring environment, Woven Stories supports the user not only as his or her individual cognitive tool, but also as a shared platform to reflect ideas and thought processes of other users with related interests. Thus, a group of users can apply Woven Stories to tasks such as creative problem solving.

Making Construals as a New Digital Skill: Dissolving the Program - and the Programmer - Interface

Making a construal is a way of using the computer to help us in making sense of a situation. Its merits as a new digital skill for developing open educational resources in the constructionist tradition are illustrated using a basic construal of shopping activity. Making construals is the central theme of the three year EU Erasmus+ CONSTRUIT! project. This paper takes the form of an introductory tutorial highlighting key qualities of construals that will shape the CONSTRUIT! agenda.

Woven stories: collaboratively authoring microworlds via the Internet

Stories as microworlds provide an attractive and open environment for learning. They are easy to combine with almost any subject matter, and students can create them by their own, also in groups. Woven stories are composed of units or text passages called nodes. Thus, they can be represented visually as graphs on a display. Several authors can work on their common woven story simultaneously, by linking different plots together by joining nodes. A preliminary prototype of woven stories was implemented as a web site. Although a simple framework, it reveals the strength of stories as an educational resource and the value of a computer as a technique to enhance the learning process. Moreover, the concept of the woven stories is versatile enough to be applied in various kinds of educational settings. The prototype is available at http://www.cs.Helsinki.fi/group/stories/.

StoryML: An XML Extension for Woven Stories

StoryML is an XML-based representation of metadata elements connected to collaboratively written stories. The StoryML specification gives means to interpret and specify the core characteristics of stories. Hence, StoryML supports the functionality of information retrieval, filtering and adaptive representation of stories. These intelligence properties make collaboratively written stories a significant platform for truly activating, open learning environments.

Playing Games with Observation, Dependency, and Agency in a New Environment for Making Construals

Making construals is a new digital skill that complements conventional programming. Its primary focus is on using computer-related technology to stage interactive experience of unprecedented richness and subtlety. This paper is a tutorial on the latest version of an instrument for making construals developed in the ongoing EU Erasmus+ CONSTRUIT! project. Its principal theme is the re-creation of the OXO laboratory - an interactive environment in which variants of the game of noughts-and-crosses can be freely designed and evaluated.