Convergent storytelling for EFL & ELE: Inanimate Alice

Imagen de elenaberu
Submitted by elenaberu on Vie, 12/12/2008 - 01:15

Thanks to Ian Harper, producer of The BradField Company, I happily discover the widely awarded Inanimate Alice (actually, thanks to the Edublog Awards nomination, if it weren’t for them, I’d have never been the recipient of his email). I was supposed to grade a pile of compositions, but I ended up engrossed in watching/reading/participating in the story - and I haven’t finished yet!

Quote:

‘Inanimate Alice’ tells the story of Alice, a young girl growing up in the first half of the 21st century, and her imaginary digital friend, Brad. Over ten episodes, each a self contained story, we see Alice grow from an eight year old living with her parents in a remote region of Northern China to a talented mid-twenties animator and designer with the biggest games company in the world.

Inanimate Alice can be depicted as a distinctive, engrossing, transversal and mysterious product of current convergence culture, where traditional media (along with their narrative style) meet internet-based media. How can we call this sort of stories? Interactive fiction? digital fiction? digital storytelling? I’ll leave the semantics apart but I agree with one of the authors -Kate Pullinger- on the fact that we need a better name.

I’ll use “convergent storytelling” (’convergent’ as defined by H. Jenkins in his -highly recommended- book “Convergence Culture”).

In a nutshell, Inanimate Alice is an example of storytelling, increasing its complexity and interactivity with us as the main character, Alice, gets older and develops her career as an animator. Are we watchers, readers or characters in the story? As a hybrid genre -mixing video, pictures, sounds, text and illustrations- it requires some sort of hybrid reading and participation to an extent. Nonetheless, this participation is just confined to clicking on fixed elements of the story and on the >> button, although it gets more complex as the story unfolds. This kind of interaction and linearity places Inanimate Alice closer to books than to interactive games, for instance. However, it seems the creators of the story (Kate Pullinger, Chris Joseph and Ian Harper) didn’t want to produce an interactive game where readers had to divert from the main story but an engrossing multimedia narrative (I recommend you to read Kristen McLean’s review).

http://www.inanimatealice.com/









Inanimate Alice via kwout

The stories are also available in Spanish (recurso interesantísimo para ELE y para la asignatura de lengua y literatura), as well as in French, Italian and German (as part of the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue).

If you register to receive their newsletter (free), you’ll be emailed the links to the haunting music used in the story (mp3). On top of that, you’ll be able to download a pdf called ‘Education Pack‘, in which Inanimate Alice is presented as a pedagogy project. The pdf contains lesson plans along with student resources (excellent).

Even though the story works great with very young learners -kids and teens- and basically with anyone who likes reading, fiction and fantasy, I’m currently working with young adults, aged 19-23, and I don’t know if this would be a gripping resource for them. However, probably due to the urge to include user-generated content, The Bradfield Company offers a piece of software for educational institutions, iStori.es, that allows learners to create their own stories in the same fashion. It’s not free, but it isn’t pricey either: £99 (perpetual license). What I miss: a 30-day trial. I downloaded their HarisStory.exe to see an example of a mash-up created with iStori.es but it crashed with Windows Vista (at home I only have Ubuntu Hardy…so will I ever see it?)

Plus, if I were them, I would develop and feed a complementary social site (not a static page listing examples) in which learners could upload their own mash-ups (+ tagging, rating, bookmarking, etc). It’d be a great chance to see how iStori.es works, to get new ideas and of course, it’d enrich the Inanimate Alice project itself (but I might be suggesting this because I’m biased by my own freelancing).

If you want to know more about convergent storytelling:

Plus, if you work with undergrads/grads, it might be interesting for you to know that the University of California announced the following competition, as part of their Transliteracies Project: “Social Computing in 2020″ Bluesky Innovation Competition: What will social computing technologies and practices be like in the year 2020? . Students from any discipline are encouraged to wrap their idea in the most imaginative way, using a wide range of possible formats. It sounds pretty interesting to me: Connecting social media + future + transmedia + award + imagination.