Telling Stories

Thanks are due Susan Kambalu's post on Digital Stories for drawing the We Tell Stories 6 from Penguin to my attention. It is a brilliant idea and Penguin have done a fantastic job putting it together. Of the three works of digital fiction published so far, I think my favourite is The 21 Steps.

27/365: Fix?
Originally uploaded by DavidDMuir

What I especially like is that the techniques used to tell these stories could easily be used by pupils to create their own examples of digital fiction. For example, I'm really inspired to have a go at telling stories using Google Earth along the lines of The 21 Steps and I hope I get the chance to try it with some students soon.

It also reminded me of work I did with BEd students towards the end of last year where we used Flickr to tell stories. Here for example are a few of their six word story ideas:

• The morning after the night before!
• He wished he'd stayed in bed!
• Removing the evidence, sigh of relief!
• Sleepy Girl, Scary Man, Bad combination

We also had a go at some stories in five frames:

• Happiness is ...
• Snacking {Although neither story used my favourite photo. :-)}
  
• The Tree
  
• The Book of Shadows
  
• Walking To Uni
  

I was also intrigued by the possibilities of using Flickr to make Choose your own adventure games. Flickr may not be the best way to create this kind of game but it does make them very easy to share. I had a go and created the Jargon Hall Adventure. There's potentially a lot of creative writing in describing the locations and the decisions to be made... and it was surprisingly good fun to make. :-)

And finally... Twitterstories! A simple, but stunningly brilliant idea. One hundred and forty students, from around the globe, each contributing a Twitter message to tell a story. (See Mr Mayo's blog for more details.) What I really like about this project is the constraints that the pupils have to work within, for example, Twitter messages must be 140 characters (or less) in length and the story must reach some conclusion within 140 messages. The authors will have to pick their words very carefully to keep their message within the word limit while still moving the story on and keeping it interesting. Are your pupils overly verbose, using a plethora of extraneous words and multiple sub-clauses, which, in actual fact are full of repetitive, redundant and superfluous detail and, in the final analysis, producing long, rambling and confusing work? :-) Perhaps the constraints of a twitterstory would help. (Twitterstory or Twition or Twittory or ... ? A good idea in search of a good name!)

Do you know of any good examples of pupil produced digital stories?

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