The Power of Story
At the beginning of this year and end of last year, I wrote about branching scenarios and simulations. Those posts were:
The Power of Choice and Consequence in Learning
5 Things to Consider when Designing a Branching Scenario or Simulation
More Tips & Tricks for Developing Branching Scenarios
I really like branching scenarios and simulations for allowing learners the opportunity to make real decisions and then to experience the feedback that comes as a result of the decisions they made. It’s great for promoting autonomy and great for enhancing learning I think.
There’s a workshop on branching scenarios and simulations that I facilitate at the university where I work. In that last post, I mention involving some emotion and telling a story visually as a couple of the tips for designing your branching scenarios. I’ve really wanted to add more of the importance of story and story telling to my workshop. I hadn’t though because I hadn’t found the right connection.
Then I listened to this podcast from Connie Malamed at the eLearning Coach. She was interviewing Lisa Cron, who at the time of the interview was the Editor for Wired Magazine and had written a book called Wired for Story. The way she spoke about story was exactly the connection I was looking for when it came to branching scenarios and simulations.
Here are a few of the things she says about story:
· Story is the language of the brain.
· Story was our first virtual reality.
· Stories are simulation that allow us to experience things that we have not yet gone through and problems that we haven’t yet faced and feel what it would feel like to actually have to solve them and overcome them.
· We don’t turn to story to escape reality. We turn to story to navigate reality.
· A good story makes the reader want to know what happens next [i.e., dopamine activation]. What’s the emotional cost to solving the problem?
· If you don’t have a protagonist you don’t have a story. The protagonist is the reader’s surrogate or avatar.
· A good story breaks a pattern. A story arises when our expectations of what should happen haven’t been met. We are surprised by the outcome.
· The story isn’t about the plot level. It’s about how the plot affects the protagonist. The protagonist has to overcome a challenge or problem. What does the protagonist learn as a result?
· A story achieves two goals: first it gives the protagonist something to go after — to learn something; and second, it helps them learn what they need to do to achieve that thing they wanted along the way. The question what’s holding the protagonist back gets answered in a good story.
· Story is about sense making. How your protagonist is making sense of everything that is happening. You can’t just show a change happening in the story. You need to be explicit and show what the protagonist needed to learn in order to make that change (but in the moment that they learn it).
· If we’re not feeling, we’re not reading a good story. Emotions and cognition are completely intertwined.
· The story is an emotional costs-benefits analysis of taking a certain action. It’s not about what happens it’s about how what happens affects the protagonist.
Like she says, every story has a plot — a storyline — but that’s not the important part. It’s the impact of the plot on the main character, what was learned by the main character and the main character’s transformation. Isn’t that what we want from our learning designs? A change in behaviour? Transformation?
Here’s a neat example of a kind of branching scenario from IBM Mobile called Outage.
So if you watched it then you can see that the plot is about an employee at a power plant who is working the night of a major rain storm with thunder and lightning. She has to deal with a citywide power outage that occurs because of the storm. The real story though is about the main character and her uncertainty around being ready to do the job. And she faces the challenges and overcomes them showing that she was ready. Of course, that ‘she’ is me or you or whoever plays the game and assumes her role.
In a branching scenario or simulation, we take on the role of the protagonist. Through the choices we make, we have a chance to show our understanding of a particular content area and prove to ourselves and everyone else that we are competent.
Now maybe your branching scenario doesn’t have a place for story. You need your learners to learn to put in an IV and there are steps for that, not a story. That’s fine. But maybe your scenario has the possibility of story. If so, I say take the time to build it in. I think your learners will be better off because of it.
