This is the link to my Twine story “Brynna Loves Dogs”:
When I was a child, I really enjoyed the “choose your own adventure” books. Therefore, this Twine task really appealed to me, as I thought that it would be fun to create my own version online. I wrote this story with my six-year old daughter in mind, as she really loves dogs and drawing.
I have to confess that this task was WAY more difficult than I thought it would be. Not only did I have to write a fictional story (and I had to do this linearly, as this is the only way I have been taught to write a story), but I had to learn how to use a new program Twine. Then, I had to plan out the different slides for my story, how they would connect through hyperlinks, and how to do some very basic formatting. From what I understand, Twine combines JavaScript, CSS, and HTML into one language, Harlowe, to code the story or game, which makes it more readily accessible to non-programmers. I definitely appreciate this, as while I have done a few very basic tutorials on JavaScript, it is definitely not enough to be able to do anything with it yet. And yet, even with a simplified version way to create hypertext through an application that does most of the coding for you, I still felt like “programming” and formatting this story for the internet was difficult.
Ultimately, I would have loved to add additional elements to my story like more than one picture and/or more sound effects, but there ended up being so many aspects that made these additions complicated. The one picture that I did add of the pug ended up being way too big, and I have no idea how to size down. When I went to add some audio of the song “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” to my shooting star slide, the code did not copy and paste properly and because the audio file code was so incredibly long, I gave up on editing it to make it work.
In the end, I am left with something that I feel is not at all finished, but yet, I’m still quite proud of it. I realize that I was a bit preoccupied with the “how” of connecting my slides, that I did not always put the hyperlink on the most appropriate word – just the final word. However, this is my first attempt at using this program, and I could definitely see using it again and gradually adding complexity to my stories (or games). I could even see coming back to this story and adding more, as I know my daughter would appreciate more pictures and audio. It really was not until closer to the end of creating the story that I was able to think up more ways that I could have added hyperlinks for additional information.
However, being able to create this type of digital text, requires a lot of skill but also a shift in thinking from writing just a typical story. One of the main things that I noticed while beginning this task was how illiterate I actually felt trying to complete something that involves very basic knowledge of a computer code. After I finished my story, I started to think about my experience as a Reading Recovery teacher is that when we are teaching young children how to read books, we assess and teach “Concepts About Print”. These are some of the basic concepts that children need to master in order to be able to decode a book, such as the orientation of the book, reading the left page and then the right page, reading top to bottom, basic punctuation, etc. However, many of these concepts go out the window when you are reading and creating on the Internet.
In the 21st century, being able to learn to read a book is no longer the apex of literacy, but what are the “Concepts About Hypertext” that children should be learning? Many of the basic concepts about print no longer apply on the Internet, and the existence of hypertext if one of these conceptual features that deserves more attention. Bolter (2001) states that “the supporters of hypertext may even argue that hypertext reflects the nature of the human mind itself – that because we think associatively, not linearly, hypertext allows us to write as we think” (p.42). Yet in schools, we are still teaching a very printed-text based, linear approach to reading and writing, which is not necessarily serving our students of the 21 century very well.
Finally, learning about Hypertext, made me think about a video on Tik Tok that I saw by the creator @yaaahurdddd who does Wikipedia “speed runs”. He follows the hyperlinks to find the connection from one prompt, such as “Pikachu” to the final destination “King Tut” in less than 30 seconds. If you have TikTok, I would recommend checking out his videos, as it is pretty impressive.
References
Bolter, J.D. (2001). Writing space: computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. New York, NY: Routledge
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