Digital Storytelling
Challenges in moving from print to digital
How do the acts of writing and reading change as we move from print to screen-based or digital platforms?
While it may seem that the move between old-media writing and new-media writing (Novitz 2020) is just changing the surface on which we are obtaining the words to read, exploring digital platforms can offer many unforeseen positives.
While video games are still often seen as immature hobbies, or for children only, there have been many positive outcomes from the move to the digital landscape. Antzaka et al. (2017) studied the improvement in ‘attentional components’ and also the ‘reading fluency’ in children when linked with playing Action video games, despite the games and books seeming to be very different mediums.
In my personal experience of this, my 6-year-old hates sitting down and reading books, but when he’s reading dialogue or narrative subtitles in games, he flies through the sentences without thinking about the individual words. Using the digital platform gives him the confidence that he doesn’t exhibit when made to read out of a hardcopy book.
