These are multimedia editors explicitly (and, often, exclusively) oriented to the creation of stories made of a sequence of pictures or scenes completed by textual (written or spoken) parts, as in cartoon strips and movies. To facilitate story construction, such editors provide collections of predefined backgrounds, characters, props, speech bubbles and often also voice recording and animation functions.
Published in Chapter:
Narrative Learning Environments
Giuliana Dettori (Institute for Educational Technology, National Research Council, Italy)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 9
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-845-1.ch076
Abstract
Narrative, in the form of stories and narrations, is a natural mode of communication and expression, familiar to children from a very early age and frequently used also by adults. For this reason, it has often been informally employed, both in and outside school, to facilitate understanding and raise learners’ interest, therefore supporting learning in both its cognitive and motivational aspects. For a long time, however, narrative was not an object of interest for the educational research. Its first systematic analyses were worked out within humanities studies, characterizing it in several different ways. Some of such definitions already highlight characteristics that appear crucial for its use in education. Ricoeur (1981), for instance, describes it as a sequence of events connected with each other by cause-effect relations supporting the construction of a meaningful totality out of a set of scattered events.