2. Alex Quinn, StoryKit Developer Ben Bederson, ICDL reader AllisonDruin, HCIL Director Acknowledging those without whom this research could not have been done
15. Children How are integrated authoring tools in mobile devices being used by children? Mobile Technologies Storytelling How might their use inform their design?
23. “Who are these people who dare to reinvent mythology?” Children + Storytelling Paley, V. (1991). The boy who would be a helicopter (1st ed.). Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press. .
59. Users can customize their activities and interfacesKlopfer, E., Squire, K., & Jenkins, H. (2002). Environmental Detectives: PDAs as a window into a virtual simulated world. In Proceedings, IEEE Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education, 2002.
60. “It’s a nice tool to get kids to interact with each other…The whole family can sit around And take turns. I like that it can be passed around.” “It felt, like it was a bonding time. Maybe he doesn’t understand the bonding atmosphere, But he seemed like he was really bonding with me, learning what I had to say… and then showing me how to manipulate the [interface] to do certain things…” Social Interactivity: Users can collaborate and exchange data face-to-face
61. “We traded off drawing the pictures and doing the writing, so, one of us would write And one of us would make the pictures. That was lots of fun.” “It’s sort of magical for me – it’s a very unique way of writing. You can take it anywhere.” Portability: Users can move freely across & within sites
62. “These [recordings] add a whole new facet to the storytelling.” “It’s kind of fun to have a time limit – maybe two minutes would be fun – to see how much information you could give in two minutes .” Context Sensitivity: Users can collect and respond to current location & events.
63. “It’s all in one. You can record sound, take pictures, do text. You have a full publishing tool, right there in your hand.” “The integrative function of it, being able to put the story – the words and the pictures together right now on the page. It was really cool.” “A lot of times – even me, as a photographer – you have all these photos, but to put them together in something that makes sense or is easy to share, it’s a lot. Here’s a device that is fairly easy, and if families can use it…with the end-product in mind, then instead of taking a bunch of pictures and having to go back and rearrange them… You have them already there, with your mind already…thinking on the story.” Integrated Interface: Multiple modes of input and media in one
64. “I had 2nd and 3rd grade students who had a hard time – the act of writing was a chore for them… So, lots of times they would dictate and I would write... They would come up with really great stories – then they could copy it over. I think that especially for kids who have issues with the act of writing – there are a lot of kids like that, and they’re very creative but it’s just the chore of writing – this would be great.” “Anytime kids can use technology like this to gather and document their experience, and then to extend that experience by sharing it with other people… We know [that] works for learning. It’s the reflection and the extension. Like, somebody told me a story and now I’m gonna tell it to you, and in that telling I own it and it’s part of me.” Education: Opportunities for authentic learning
77. Authoring task & sociability was enriched by affordances specific to mobile devices
78.
Notas do Editor
Storytelling (narrative) is a fundamental factor in human cognition and communicationWe need stories cognitively – to make sense of the world around us, and socially, to learn about our own identities and cultures and to explore othersPolkinghorne – to make life meaningfulJohn-Seely Brown / Wenger – to increase organizational knowledgeLevi-Strauss & Propp – a deep structure or universal grammar embedded within all storiesNew Media Literacies – exploring identity, cultural heritageReader Response Theory – Louise Rosenblatt;Dialogue – BakhtinChildren – Storytelling – Bettelheim (psychology – to experiment
Storytelling – where children get a lifeWhere children experiment with making choices“Who are these people who dare to reinvent mythology?”“pretend …is the child’s real & serious world, the stage upon which any identity is possible & Secret thoughts can be safely revealed”
Of the design research undertaken in the past decade on mobile devices to support children’s storytelling, research by Makela et al. (2000), Hartnell-Young and Vetere (2008), and Jokela et al. (2008) offer the most insight for the StoryKit study described here. Makela et al (2000) report results of early field trials on the use of camera phones to share images and short messages. The phones enabled field trial participants to take photos, do simple image editing, and share them via wireless. Short, maximum five-photo-long series could also be created and enhanced with simple transition and sound effects – in effect, allowing simple story creation and sharing. The participants included children and adult family and friends, like the StoryKit study. While the participants enjoyed the prototypes and used them extensively, they asked for more image editing options and the ability to annotate the images with text or more expressive audio (i.e., beyond simple transition sound effects). Hartnell-Young and Vetere (2008) describe the findings from an ethnographic case study of teenage children who created video stories about their everyday lives using mobile phones. While the target age group and overall theme of their study is close to the StoryKit work, design of an integrated storytelling application for mobile devices was not their focus. More recently, Jokela et al. (2008) developed the Mobile Multimedia Presentation Editor (MMPE), a mobile application for creating multimedia-based presentations or stories. Like StoryKit, the MMPE integrates audio, image and text into its authoring interface, and users can view, edit, save and share their creations. While the MMPE also allows for video-creation and editing, StoryKit does not. Similarly, the MMPE did not implement drawing or painting tools to its repertoire, while StoryKit includes a paint/draw tool – a requirement emphasized by the child partners who helped design it. The target age group for the MMPE was young adult and older (24+); the target age group for StoryKit starts much younger, at 4-5 years, but can extend to 74+ years, with a core range between 7 and 18. Interestingly, the metaphor used for the MMPE is that of presentation, while that of StoryKit is the book, or story. Intuitively, the storybook metaphor is more accessible to children than the presentation metaphor, as most have been exposed to various story and book formats from infancy.
Commercially, do-it-yourself book-publishing sites such as TikaTok[website/#cite] and StoryBird[website/#cite], along with the children’s magazine, StoneSoup[website/#cite], offer children the opportunity to share their digital (and print-for-purchase) creations with family, friends, and other children; however, these systems have not ported their features to mobile devices. Further, StoneSoup follows a relatively formal submission and review process [website/#cite]. Most of the writing samples are polished products, published after possibly having undergone multiple revisions. Children and adults alike may see impressive finished works; however, the children lose an opportunity to construct, review and share their efforts iteratively. Enabling transparency into the story creation process, and ensuring preservation of intermittent creations for sharing with others are an important interaction requirement for children’s storytelling, and is supported by constructivist/constructionist development theories, such as Dewey and Papert (Dewey, 1910/1997; Fails, 2007; Franckel et al., (in press); Papert, 1993). StoryBird provides these views into the transformations that children’s stories can undergo by allowing subscribers to share comments that can change the story flow. However, StoryBird is primarily a social networking site whose collaborative potential has not been incorporated into mobile storytelling applications.
Take a closer look at the editing interface and tools palette for an individual page.
Caitlyn’s OXON HILL Storyhttp://iphone.childrenslibrary.org/cgi-bin/view.py?b=5o23wjutniuemmwk3u62Geese (Michael) OXON HILL Storyhttp://iphone.childrenslibrary.org/cgi-bin/view.py?b=43hdlyfjvwx5yyeld7nsWhat to notice – Mixture of media and modes of communication (and I/O) –Which are iPods, which are iPhones….Lots of audioContext Sensitivity – An interest in capturing the experience (sounds of hayride, sounds of milk hitting the bucket)
Klopfer – Teacher EdSquire – Comparative Media StudiesJenkins
The social interactivity was supported by the small form factor of the device – demanded that the device had to be passed around – like a book.
She could tweet….
When asked what they liked best ---
When asked what they liked best ---
Get a list of top countries,Get the iPod vs. iPhone statistics
Charts that show the Device Distribution for all StoryKit Users (Left)And those StoryKit Authors who shared storiesNote the changing distribution ….
1) the analysis showed that rich stories are being created and shared by users even though the interface is simple, because StoryKit integrated several multimodal tools that other mobile apps have only used in part (e.g., Jokela used photos and short text, but limited their use to 5 sequences, and had no audio; the MMPE used video, but had no real story context/metaphor that people could use to create 'stories'...so some multimodal expressive aspects were missing);2) the analysis showed that the task of writing/sharing stories between kids-kids and grownups-kids (or any combination of users) was enriched by context-sensitivity (i.e., the audio, the picture taking), the "in-the-moment" capture of memories, and the portability. All of these are inherently part of a mobile device, so that's not so exciting. However, because StoryKit used the metaphor of the storybook, it was a familiar construct for kids and grownups -- for example, children's publishing is one of the few areas that continues to grow in publishing circles, where other areas are floundering. I "concluded" that the combination of the integrated media tools, the storybook metaphor, and the device inherent portability/context sensitivity was what made it more interesting/engaging to use and what made the stories more detailed/different/richer narrative expressions.