This book offers insight and lessons learned from two pilot studies which used interactive digital narrative (IDN) as educational interventions to effect positive change regarding social issues, looking into interdisciplinary approaches to research and education methods, combining arts and science methodologies and science communication.

The book is concerned with narrative in digital media that changes according to user input—Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN). It provides a broad overview of current issues and future directions in this multi-disciplinary field that includes humanities-based and computational perspectives. It assembles the voices of leading researchers and practitioners like Janet Murray, Marie-Laure Ryan, Scott Rettberg and Martin Rieser. In three sections, it covers history, theoretical perspectives and varieties of practice including narrative game design, with a special focus on changes in the power relationship between audience and author enabled by interactivity. After discussing the historical development of diverse forms, the book presents theoretical standpoints including a semiotic perspective, a proposal for a specific theoretical framework and an inquiry into the role of artificial intelligence. Finally, it analyses varieties of current practice from digital poetry to location-based applications, artistic experiments and expanded remakes of older narrative game titles.

This book explores how digital storytelling can catalyze change in healthcare. Edited by the co-founders of the award-winning Patient Voices Programme, the authors discuss various applications for this technique; from using digital storytelling as a reflective process, to the use of digital stories in augmenting quantitative data. Through six main sections this second edition covers areas including healthcare education, patient engagement, quality improvement and the use of digital storytelling research. The chapters illuminate how digital storytelling can lead to greater humanity, understanding and, ultimately, compassion. This collection will appeal to those involved in delivering, managing or receiving healthcare and healthcare education and research, as well as people interested in digital storytelling and participatory media.

This remarkably clearly written and timely critical evaluation of core issues in the study and application of interactive digital narrative (IDN) untangles the range of theories and arguments that have developed around IDN over the past three decades. Looking back over the past 30 years of theorizing around interactivity, storytelling, and the digital across the fields of game design/game studies, media studies, and narratology, as well as interactive documentary and other emerging forms, this text offers important and insightful correctives to common misunderstandings that pervade the field. This book also changes the perspective on IDN by introducing a comprehensive conceptual framework influenced by cybernetics and cognitive narratology, addressing limitations of perspectives originally developed for legacy media forms. Applying its framework, the book analyzes successful works and lays out concrete design advice, providing instructors, students, and practitioners with a more precise and specific understanding of IDN. This will be essential reading for courses in interactive narrative, interactive storytelling, and game writing, as well as digital media more generally.

As digital life stories continue to assume more and more significance across a range of institutions, so too does their potential to bring into focus once marginalised and neglected voices. Breaking new ground by reframing multimedia life stories as a resource for education, public health, and policy, this book challenges policymakers, professionals, and researchers to reimagine how they find out about and respond to people’s daily lives and experiences of health, disability, and well-being. The book develops theoretical, methodological, and practical resources for listening to digital stories through a series of carefully selected international case studies, from dementia care education to campaigns in the UN to ban cluster munitions. The case studies explore and illuminate different ways that digital stories have – and have not – been listened to in the past. The authors expose the great potential as well as the complexity of using powerful personal stories in practice. Together, the case studies highlight that processes of listening to, learning from, and making use of digital stories involve unavoidable processes of reinterpretation, recontextualisation, and translation which have significant ethical and political implications for storytellers, listeners, and society. In mapping and theorising the movement of stories into new contexts of policy and practice, the book offers a critical lens on the widely celebrated democratising potential of digital storytelling and its capacity to amplify marginalised voices. Digital Storytelling in Health and Social Policy develops an authoritative and original re-conceptualisation of digital life stories and their use for social justice ends, and will be important reading for researchers and practitioners from a range of backgrounds, including social policy, digital media, communication, education, disability, and public health.

Editor Biography: Jim Prentzas received the diploma degree in computer engineering and informatics and the MSc and PhD degrees from the Department of Computer Engineering and Informatics, University of Patras, Greece, in 1997, 2001, and 2003, respectively. He is currently an associate professor in the Department of Education Sciences in Early Childhood, School of Education Sciences, Democritus University of Thrace, Greece. His main research interests include artificial intelligence, e-learning and Web applications. He has published more than 70 papers in international journals, edited volumes, and proceedings of conferences and workshops. He has also co-edited two volumes published by an international publisher. He has participated in a number of National and European research projects. Book Description: This book is an edited collection of chapters regarding the integration of digital stories in the classroom, focusing on early childhood and primary education. Storytelling has always been an effective way of teaching all ranges of subjects at all educational levels, especially in early childhood and primary education. Digital storytelling combines the advantages of storytelling and digital tools. Digital stories attract the interest of students and provide them with motives to take part in learning activities in collaboration with their classmates and teachers. They have become a popular resource of Information and Communications Technology (ICT). Digital stories can be a valuable tool to educators. However, as is the case with many ICT resources, teachers need practical ideas about how to integrate them in teaching and learning. This book covers a gap in the international bibliography regarding digital storytelling. It discusses teaching scenarios that exploit digital stories in a wide range of subjects in early childhood and primary education. Subjects covered in teaching scenarios discussed in this book include language, time concepts, music, poetry, social tolerance in multicultural societies, mathematics, environmental issues, foreign language learning, healthy nutrition, mythology and geography. Such a diversity of issues concerning integration of digital stories in early childhood and primary education has not been dealt with in other published books until now. The discussed teaching scenarios involve two- and three-dimensional digital stories implemented with the visual programming tools Scratch and Alice. Scratch is implemented by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and enables the creation of two-dimensional multimedia applications. Alice is implemented by Carnegie Mellon and enables the creation of three-dimensional multimedia applications. Both of these tools are available at no charge and are popular in education throughout the world. The created digital stories have been combined with self-assessment e-activities created with JClic to provide further advantages to students. JClic is a free software tool implemented in Spain that enables the creation of interactive assessment activities addressed to early childhood and elementary education. The book is organized into three main parts and consists of ten chapters. The first part consists of two chapters discussing general background issues concerning storytelling, ICT and digital storytelling in education. The second part consists of four chapters discussing teaching scenarios involving early childhood education. The third part consists of four chapters discussing teaching scenarios regarding primary education. Target Audience: *Early childhood teachers, school teachers as well as academic and teaching staff members of Universities that would like to integrate digital stories in learning and teaching, *Undergraduate/postgraduate students as well as academic and teaching staff members of University Departments educating pre-service and in-service teachers, *Undergraduate/postgraduate students as well as academic and teaching staff members of Computing Departments, *Researchers working in the field of education, educational technology, digital storytelling, multimedia and computing education, *Programmers and researchers developing tools concerning digital storytelling, multimedia and computing education, *Computer Science school teachers who are interested in: (a) teaching students how to create interdisciplinary multimedia applications while learning programming concepts and (b) collaborating with teachers teaching other fields.