These are learning environments where the user gets engaged in some learning activity in which a story plays a central role to facilitate learning. In such environments, a story can be given to the learners or be constructed by them. In the first case, the given story helps the learners build an overall mental picture of a problem situation, highlighting the role and relation of the different data involved. In the second case, the construction of a story by the learners aims to facilitate the acquisition of some competence, e.g. expression abilities, in mother tongue or in a foreign language, various subject matters and soft skills. A variety of ICT tools can be used in NLEs to amplify the learning potential of stories, by speeding up their creation or facilitating their fruition. Such tools can range from general-purpose software (like email) to weakly specialized one (like narrative editors), and up to very specialized one (like conversational and autonomous agents).
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.