Storytelling at a Distance
ABSTRACT
Storytelling is one of the most effective techniques for conveying information in a compelling and memorable way. The use of stories is more fun for presenters and students than unidimensional exposition. Stories build tension and suspense in anticipation of a resolution, making them entertaining and engaging modes of explication. Good storytelling is an art in the classroom; but, at a distance, storytelling becomes problematic. Currently, neither synchronous nor asynchronous distance-learning technologies capture the wealth of visual cues and expressiveness found in face-to-face classroom experiences. In particular, some of the issues with asynchronous technologies are the lack of spontaneity and the tendency to sanitize stories when capturing them as text, audio, or video. Nevertheless, there are strategies that overcome these delivery technologies' constraints and enable stories' power to be appropriated for successful e-learning solutions. These strategies also encourage students to tell their own stories, thus deepening their educational experience.
1. INTRODUCTION
With its long and rich history (Wetzel, 2000), storytelling is "the original form of teaching" (Pederson, 1995). People tell and listen to stories because stories bring the vibrancy of lived experience to interpersonal dialogue. Teachers, religious leaders, politicians, comedians, and journalists routinely embed stories in their talks and writing to illustrate points and capture their audience's attention. The attention given storytellers in these roles suggests that listening to well-told stories is an activity that people find intrinsically satisfying.
Stories and storytelling emerged early to create the rich preliterate oral tradition, in which cultures preserved their memories and taught virtue through tales that recounted adventure, battles, romance, and heroism. Storytelling remains an important mode through which individuals and cultures communicate who they are, what they value and fear, and what they know. Stories have made their way into corporate knowledge management and branding. Now, as e-learning's sophistication advances, curriculum developers and e-learning teachers are exploring online, or digital, storytelling, as a comparatively unexploited strategy for embodying and delivering content. Storytelling is especially effective for conveying informal information because of stories' capacities for subtlety, their attention-arresting nature, and their ability to convey layers of meaning. These factors all contribute to learners' tendency to remember and further ponder stories' meaning. Despite stories' pedagogical appeal, there remain unresolved issues concerning how to select, structure, and deliver technologically mediated stories to distance learners. In this paper, I suggest that an important distinction must be made between stories and storytelling and that thinking through several foundational questions must precede the delivery of successful e-learning. These questions include: Why are stories pedagogically valuable in a distance-learning course? How can curriculum developers and teachers ensure that their online stories clarify and reinforce specific ideas rather than distract from those ideas? How should humor be appropriated in online storytelling? Finally, I argue that much more extensive attention must be focused on how to craft, capture, and deliver stories in the divergent synchronous and asynchronous learning models.
2. STORIES AND E-LEARNING
Stories are important cognitive events of particular pedagogical value because they encapsulate into one rhetorical package four of the crucial elements of human communication: information, knowledge, context, and emotion (Norman, 1993). "Educational media, such as lectures, books, TV programmes, are all narrative in form, and for good reason. Narrative provides a macro-structure, which creates global coherence, contributes to local coherence and aids recall through its network of causal links and sign posting... Narrative is fundamentally linked to cognition and so is particularly relevant to the design of multimedia for learning" (Laurillard et al., 2000). Digital storytelling appropriates the e-learning medium to involve readers in narrative structures that reveal context, highlight reasons to care about a topic, expose cause-and-effect relationships, explicate values and motivations, and demonstrate interdependencies.
The narrative arc is the framework that drives the story in digital storytelling. The arc's structure of question, tension, and closure demands and focuses learners' attention, provokes curiosity, beckons involvement and inquiry, and sustains engagement. Thus, stories are more compelling and memorable than alternative ways of conveying information in the classroom. While presenters report that stories help pace their classes, they also speak of the enjoyment they experience from storytelling. Well-told stories make for enjoyable, comfortable, and familiar listening and learning, due to their prevalence in most people's lives from a young age. "The familiarity of the narrative form acts as something of a comforter when a new student is faced with the double impact of being new to study and new to the technology" (Weller 2000).
The subtlety and efficiency with which stories convey information allows presenters to imbed in them many content points on multiple levels. For instance, a story about a design issue may incorporate subsidiary lessons about client interaction. Students are likely to better receive, process, and retain the subtle client-interaction material when they receive it as part of a larger story than they would were the same material presented obliquely as a disembodied object lesson. One of the main reasons for this is that stories give students access to agents who bear witness to abstract concepts or specific, valuable information. This embodiment by a human agent of concepts and information helps close the distance between learner and content, a distance that is often difficult to bridge through cerebration alone.
