Four dimensions of digital heritage educational resources. The communicative dimension

Digital Storytelling Festival. Europeana, The Heritage Lab. CC BY-SA

The communicative dimension of the digital heritage educational resources is related to the ways the content is presented and how the digital elements generate interaction and engagement with the audience.

To communicate in the most effective way getting the interest, participation, and engagement of the audience through digital media, a number of aspects must be used:

- A well-developed digital storytelling strategy to transmit all the content.

- A number of different hypermedia elements.

- An ubiquitous structure that allows users to interact from everywhere with a device connected to the internet.

- A number of elements that favor the immersivity.

- A number of gamified elements.

1. Digital storytelling

Digital storytelling is defined as the strategy for telling stories in a digital way.

The term “digital” refers to the type of devices where it is displayed (i.e. mobile phones, tablets, computers, and any type of screen) but also the media and the platforms used for it (i.e. television, social media, web-based narratives, interactive TV, video games, VR apps, 3D cinema, etc.).

The type of storytelling used is characterized by their interactivity, for this reason, some authors named it interactive digital storytelling. It can be physically moving the audience to interact with the screen but also emotionally connecting powerfully with what they feel.

That fact changes the way the story is told, giving the opportunity to the audience to be a viewer and a participant of the story at the same time, breaking the communication roles and advancing to a new level.

The communication principles affirm that a communicative process is effective when main elements (the sender, the receiver, the message and the code) are included. If the message is transmitted through a common code known by the sender and the receiver, the receiver will include in their mental framework putting in relationship with the content already known, what it means, to use the relational learning process and to learn easily as the educational process should be done.

Also, content that generates participation with the user must be selective, transformative, and constructive (Moreno Sánchez, 2012) because it allows relating this content with an associated experience and a great learning process.

In this way, Handler Miller (2008) defines five characteristics for digital storytelling: the capacity of breaking the Fourth Wall, the capacity of blurring the distinction between fiction and reality, the possibility of expanding the story universe, the possibility of developing immersed experiences, the possibility of having new kinds of participation.

Other researchers as Robin (2006) believe in digital storytelling as a way of inviting students to tell their own stories developing skills like problem-solving, organizational, technological, etc.

In that way, the Europeana Foundation (2021) in their Task Force has identified seven tips all digital storytelling focused on heritage should have:

- Be personal: the personal stories help to relate the user with the content on an emotional level. From this perspective, digital storytelling should be sensitive to the sociocultural context.

- Be informal but expert: it is necessary to take into account the educators and cultural mediation professionals to develop the storytelling, to use an appropriate language for each audience, avoiding, for example, the academic language, if it is addressed to the general public.

- Tell hidden stories: The audience can be a powerful source of histories and think about who is missing in the picture.

- Illustrate your points: the visual image give sense to the text and even the audio gives depth to your message.

- Signpost your journey: Each section should be clearly structured. That helps the users connect to your content.

- Be specific: Go from details to the general sense through personal stories and specific images. That helps the users to focus better on the content.

- Be evocative: All senses and possible styles must be considered to get a fully immersive experience.

2. The hypermedia elements

The term hypermedia is defined as the relationship between elements from different origins and media to compose the digital content.

The relationship between the hypermedia elements aims to focus the interest of the user, generate motivation, participation, and engagement. So, the use of images, texts, hypertext, hyperlinks, audios, videos, games, etc. in a structured way gets the better result mixing with keys as the level of depth, accessibility, ergonomics, or user experience (Moreno Sánchez, 2012).

The role of each element is key. For example, according to Chion (1993), the audio helps to gather, link, highlight, anticipate or separate images in a digital resource and helps to get a better capacity of immersive with the resource.

3. Ubiquity

A digital resource with a ubiquitous structure is defined as one that can interact in a reciprocal way from any device using an internet connexion getting a complete experience or complemented using different devices.

The ubiquity helps to get a closer and more real experience with the content because it does not depend only on the user and the provider but also any device can create new information, similarly to the transmedia storytelling (Hwang et al. 2008; Báez et alli, 2019), where different contents are distributed within different channels.

The ubiquity in the heritage education resources is very related to the active participation process of the audience. In this way, an APP from a smartphone can receive metadata from different sensors along with a physical exhibition interconnecting with the audience in real-time (Alkhafaji et alii, 2020). Also, the augmented reality and the analysis of the cookies of each user helps to personalize the digital resource increasing the content and improving the immersive experience.

4. Immersivity

An immersion process can be understood as the way someone is absorbed by doing something. In an immersive experience, the communicative strategies and tools are more important than the technological assets (Taiuti 2005). Immersivity also depends on the individual process of meaning-making and how the surroundings create this effect (Lukas 2013).

According to Saler (2012), immersion in virtual worlds starts in the collective imagination when a story is adopted by many individuals and then it becomes more real. For example, everyone who reads a book imagines the story and the surroundings in a different way.

In a phenomenological approach, we could say every feeling is different as the story is the same because everyone is placed in a different landscape but there are some elements that connect with reality transposing real situations to our mind, so it is difficult to make a difference between what it is real and what it is not (Tuan, 1977).

The development of immersive experience and immersive spaces takes into account these concepts of individual perception, representation of reality, and relationship with the surroundings developing a multi-sensoriality space in transmedia storytelling (Freitag et alli 2020). It is based on some communication processes that engage more with the audience such as the creation of a soundscape (Roginska and Geluso 2018), a landscape of sounds, the use of motion image elements, or the inclusion of gamified elements among others (Scuri et alli 2016).

According to Lan (2020), immersion, participation, interaction, and authenticity are basic components of any learning process and virtual reality processes have a lot of them.

Also, the immersivity allows a new variety of unique virtual experiences different from the physical ones. Their interactive and participatory hypermedia elements get a similar effect to social media getting an embodied experience.

5. Gamification

Gamification is defined as the use of game elements in a non-gaming context; game-based learning is the process or practice of learning by using games and serious games are custom-built games with a specific learning objective.

Although three frameworks produce an increase of engagement, motivation (Rodriguez and Santigo 2015) and in their context can be used for a group of people, gamification is the only one that can be applied to any context and used for achieving goals instead of transferring knowledge or gaining skills as the second or the third one.

To implement gamification strategies or models, it is important to take a look at their mechanics, roles, storytelling, and resources (Deterding et alli 2011):

• Mechanics are the rules of the game. Some of the mechanics are acting, role-playing, territory building, etc (see here a list of them).
• Roles are derived from the characteristics of the people who are participating or the ones who aim to attract. According to Jo Kim (2015), some are competitors, collaborators, expressers, and explorers; Marczewski (2015), for example, says the roles can be socializers, disruptors, philanthropists, free spirits, and achievers. So, there’s no limit on the roles but they are needed to create avatars or personas or to define who is participating in the activity.
• Storytelling is the story of your activity. One of the most used in literature and classical games is the Hero’s journey or the monomyth.
• Resources are the materials you are going to use. Some examples are maps, cards, personas or avatar, token, etc. with different purposes (see some examples of gamified resources for social impact on education, cultural heritage, and social design on Wotify)

Finally, the gamification strategies or models are the way all the elements explained above are connected. Some models are MDA, DPE, or Octalysis (i.e.Kusuma et alli 2018)

In the case of education, the World Economic Forum (2020), for example, highlighted that 21st-century skills can be improved in a digital playful environment. Also, it can be a key role in education for preparing students for challenges and opportunities.

In the cultural heritage sector, some museums followed strategies (Nicholson 2012) and models for getting a meaningful gamified activity, for example, the Tate Museum or the Victoria and Albert Museum among others used Minecraft as a tool for gamifying the museum and other create scavenger hunt games or escape rooms.

Follow the links in each title to find more information from previous weeks related to these topics.

Find here the general perspective of the four dimensions or keep reading this series in the next post: the pedagogical dimension.

Bibliography

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