This week, I was able to attend the Triangle Usability Professionals Association’s talk on Designing Narrative-Centered Learning Environments. Dr. James Lester headed up the talk and led us through some of the opportunities and challenges towards improving the capacity of educational environments to educate when AI and gaming elements are skillfully wedded to learning needs.

I took the time to do my first sketchnote of the event. I knew that of all the things that I wanted to take away from this event, I wanted to make sure that I listened more to this idea of crafting stories that allow for various points of entry into lessons. And while this is a common point that pastors will dive into, its also something that listeners should also consider.

For example, one of the points talked about this tension between engaged experiences feeling new but educational experiences feeling stale. And we definitely have these preconceptions. The problem with that is that we treat these preconceptions as reality, and therefore end up many times throwing away the experiences that might help better engage learners, or we setup bureaucratic roadblocks which imply a prominence to a type of learning that really doesn’t exist.

There was also the mention of the term narratology (horribly misspelled on my sketchnotes) that runs very similar to the visual stories meme that I’ve been hearing much about in the digital faith space since my VSN talk. Interesting to see that story-crafting, not just story-understanding is a part of literary and media creation fields.

I’ve got some more reflection and research to do in respect to this idea of crafting stories and enabling environments. And I do think that personal and communal approaches to mobile will highlight some other ways of thinking about learning and education from a tech-tools standpoint. I’m glad though to hear that schools and UX practices are looking at these issues as well. The solution to better educational outcomes is greater when there are more hands contributing to the solution.