What is language?

 

via  Catepol

Storytelling in virtual environments – Part 3

Polgara Paine (RL: Linda Higbee Mandlebaum) was another guest speaker at the panel, her presentation was strictly connected with her in-world experience as Director of Wheelies which was founded by Simon Walsh and has become a social gathering place where storytelling has being experienced as a mean to empower members through their personal stories.

Polgara  went into Second Life to learn how to improve her teaching and has spent the past year learning more about individuals with disabilities, she reported during the event she has learned that in storytelling sessions in SL it’s necessary to have both text chat and voice chat to accommodate everyone, not to leave out someone who is deaf by only using voice chat or

someone with dyslexia or who is blind by only having only text chat.

It was interesting to know her first attempts and the difficulties she met, she said:

 

“we began by advertising that we would tell life stories, we suggested bring pictures to talk about or having a picture to look at to talk about, but someone has to know how to scan and upload a picture, so that wasn’t very effective. We started with a table, but that was such a sterile atmosphere, it was not inviting.”

Her words made all the audience reflect on different issues tied to storytelling and most of all the relevance of the input to offer to make people tell a personal story; as Gilbert Sapwood added, he often experiences that the moment he says “share a story” or “do you know a story?” people say, “oh no” so that he finally decided to change his approach and now he says, “do you have a memory you’d like to share?”: everyone has memories, but no one thinks they have stories.

 

Storytelling in virtual environments – Part 2

Isn’t it incredibly impressive?

 

 

What do you think ? Please leave your comments, if you feel like!

 

Storytelling in virtual environments – Part 1

Yesterday I participated to an event about storytelling in virtual environments , the event was organized by the Centre of Digital Storytelling (CDS) in the form of a panel in Second Life and even though there have been some technical problems such as bad quality sound and echo the event was enlightening.

We were firstly introduced to a video The Origin of Death  by the storyteller Dale Jarvis:

 

 

Dale Jarvis also known as Gilbert Sapwood in SL was one of the guest speaker in the panel, he is a storyteller, traveller and collector of tales, he is also the founder of the Storytelling Guild of Second Life, and is committed to spreading the love of traditional storytelling in Second Life.

I’m deeply attracted by storytelling practice in the educational context and I have recently experienced productive results using this “art” in my language classes: students in a multicultural study environment have a huge learning chance by sharing their stories and the use of digital tools can enrich and widen the spread of their creativity.

I had never thought to use storytelling in a virtual environment but after the above mentioned event I could appreciate by myself the strong impact of stories in SL, let’s see the following post: a recorded video from SL by Gilbert Sapwood….

Congresso SIE-L 2008

Il V Congresso della Società Italiana di e-Learning è organizzato dalla Facoltà di Economia dell’Università degli Studi di Trento (Trento 8-11 Ottobre 2008).

Il tema del congresso è “E-learning tra formazione istituzionale e life-long learning” e vuole sottolineare il ruolo delle università nella promozione di numerose sperimentazioni e applicazioni legate all’e-learning ma anche nel favorire iniziative di lifelong learning.

 

I temi proposti per il call for paper riguardano aspetti metodologici, organizzativi e tecnologici toccando una vasta area di interessi di ricerca.

 

Le deadlines per la presentazione dei contributi è il 30 maggio 2008 (sia per i full papers che per i short papers), per maggiori informazioni consultare il sito del congresso.