My Approach
As I approached this assignment, I realised that it has been a long time since I have written a story or been creative with words. For the past 4 years I have been submersed in the academic world as a student and writing learning updates as a teacher. Neither of these require a lot of creativity. I find that when I am creative it does not involve writing. I do not enjoy writing but I really enjoyed this assignment. When Botler talks about “electronic writing as a continuum in which many systems of representation can happily coexist.”(p.37), I think about how this assignment allowed me to be creative and leave the constraint of physical writing behind. I was able to use my imagination and not get caught up in the syntax and spelling like I usually do. I felt confident and creative while writing which was a new experience with me.
The second aspect that this assignment revealed to me was the collaborative nature of using hypertext. I am not a coder by any stretch of the imagination but with this assignment I was able to work collaboratively with my son. I wanted to base my story around Dungeons and Dragons, which my son is very knowledgeable as he is a Dungeon Master. He was an invaluable resource to check facts against and problem solve my coding attempts. It was a time when he became the teacher and I was the student.
I found this assignment to be challenging in the coding aspect but plan to use Twine with my students. We are embarking on a project where they will be creating a fantasy island and this would be an amazing place for them to create a non-linear story to go with their maps. We can learn the coding part together!
References:
Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space : Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.