TASK FIVE:  KATLYN

I was really impressed by Katlyn’s Twine.  We had a very similar approach, although her final result was pretty incredible.  My connections relate less to our final product, and more to how we planned and experienced this task.

First, while the sample Twine we viewed was a story, we both adapted the genre to meet the needs of our specific situation.  Being teachers, we created a Twine we thought could be used in the classroom as part of a lesson.  In this sense we are both willing to take risks and see the advantage of using technology to engage students.

When it comes to production, like Katlyn I initially thought this would be a fairly easy task.  It quickly became apparent, however, that unless I was going to be satisfied an incredibly simple final product, this task was going to require a huge amount of effort.  We both consulted the same series of YouTube videos created by Adam Hammond.  They were very helpful and allowed both of us to add some multimedia elements to our games.

Ultimately, viewing Katlyn’s Twine made me think about how a digital platform like Twine really makes the content come alive and  can enhance meaning.  Twine itself requires the viewer to make connections, and it is through this process that students are able to construct knowledge.  This reminds me of Bolter’s (2001) assertion that “Cyberspace is a great book of cultural choices that overlap and coincide with the “natural” order.  This new metaphor is yet another way in which digital technology suggests a refashioning of the tradition of the great book” (p.98).  Katlyn took a complex concept that was traditionally taught using dense science textbooks and transformed the content into one where the graphics, descriptions, and choices students make as they engage with the Twine story help them to understand the content.  While Katlyn’s Twine was focussed on the Digestive System, mine was based on introducing students to the variety of choices they may have moving from high school to post-secondary.  We took vastly different topics, but hoped to engage students in a similar way, which is to have them be actively involved in the process of learning.

Bolter, Jay David. (2001). Writing space: computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. New York, NY: Routledge.