Toward decisive principles for digital storytelling
Submitted by:
Adriana Bus
Abstract:
When I saw the first digitized picture storybooks I found them to be extremely promising. Now, almost 20 years later, storybook reading with young children has yet to realize this promise, although it is quite clear that due to new devices book reading will will become more digital in the near future. Tablets have started to find their ways into young children’s daily life more and more. The American Academy of Pediatrics advises parents to discourage their young children from interaction with digital devices. It is my opinion that it does not make sense to warn parents that young children have nothing to gain and lots to lose from spending time in front of screens, as long as parents themselves model continuous interaction with phones and tablets in the presence of their children. Instead of banning devices, we should be demanding better apps built on solid research.
The aim of my research is to define digital story telling techniques: How can we use technology to immerse children in stories and thus increase enjoyment and story understanding? This is a brand-new field different from the research in the eighties that aimed at understanding children’s processing of television or video. In my presentation, I will discuss what designers of digital picture storybooks should not do and what are promising storytelling techniques. The first generation of digital storybooks, such as “Grandma and me” and “P.B. Bear’s Birthday Party”, typically included lots of games and gimmicks. The designer’s underlying conception of how children learn was that such additions might help children to engage in stories. The outcomes of the research were negative: instead of immersing young children in stories, children were rather distracted from the story, because the games and gimmicks as parts of the digitized storybooks caused cognitive overload.
In close collaboration with app developers, I have begun to explore digital storytelling techniques that may immerse children in stories and support story comprehension and vocabulary growth. In my presentation, I will show various examples of second-generation digitized picture storybooks to demonstrate digital storytelling techniques. Apart from a definition of digital storytelling techniques, I will offer a rationale for these techniques by explaining our conception of how the human brain works. For instance, one of the techniques is based on the temporal contiguity principle: We created animated pictures that enable visual information to closely match the narrative. I will present experiments to show the efficacy of this technique and other digital storytelling techniques.
Based on recent research, I will also argue that the new generation of digitized storybooks enriched with digital storytelling techniques may even be more profitable to young children than regular storybook reading, contrary to what The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends. For the purpose of learning early literacy skills, technology-enhanced books may be as helpful as scaffolding by an adult and for some children even more helpful. Especially distractible children seem to benefit more from digital storybooks than from traditional book sharing.
As researchers, it is incumbent upon us to provide these kind of data as technology may open up new opportunities for vulnerable children and turn putative “risk” groups into successful groups. Educators must be open to the new possibilities of technology-enhanced books and turn them into new a new essential in their classrooms.