Storytelling in Google Earth

By Joey Azoulai

The Problem

Joey Azoulai

M.A, Digital Media Design for Learning; Media & Content Lead @ ExtensionEngine [ LinkedIn ]

Online learning has a problem.

The pandemic proved what many of us already believed: students think learning online is less valuable than learning in the classroom. The mass-movement of college and universities to remote teaching this semester has led, in part, to disengaged and protesting students as well as worried Deans. I would like to propose one approach to online learning that can increase student engagement in their online courses. This is the topic of my graduate thesis in Digital Media Design for Learning at NYU.

Stories can help.

Storytelling for Online Education is a website I created with Sean Diaz to help faculty use narrative in their online courses. Learning science confirms what people have always known — stories help us digest and retain new information. Stories are like maps of our human nature. They connect us to each other across culture, geography, and time. In this online course, students play the role of anthropologist and transform their research and their personal experiences into an interactive narrative world using Google Earth.

The Approach

Step 1, do your research.

Research an ancient society. Read stories about individual people, both famous and anonymous. Which events marked the lives of people in that society? Reflect on your own life experiences. How are you different? What do you share in common?

Step 3, turn research into story.

Use the information from the previous step to craft a story. Transform people into characters, places into settings, and events into the plot. The Beat Builder tool will help you use screenwriting techniques to shape your story arc. The Character Creator tool will help you breathe life into the stars of your show.

Step 2, map your research.

Assemble your research onto your Google Earth project. Add shapes, lines, and icons on the map to represent people, places, and events. Add information cards to the map using images, video, and text. Tour the map for a global view of your growing knowledge.

Step 4, map your story.

Transfer your characters, settings, and events onto your Google Earth project using icons and information cards. Link your project to the class map by uploading your profile picture or avatar. Explore your classmates' stories; how can you build on what they've created? Together, you'll turn your collective knowledge into an interactive world.

Step 5, negotiate the ending.

What correlations can you make between the people, settings, and events on the class map? How has your perspective changed as you draw connections between your story and those of your classmates? By the end of the semester, you and your classmates must arrive at a shared understanding of history. Will it be a happy ending?

Design Rationale

Constructivism

I grounded this project in Constructivist educational philosophy, which says students learn by taking ownership of their learning and by developing and testing their ideas through interactions with their world and peers (Driscoll, 2005). In this course, students select their topic, draw their own conclusions, and work to accommodate their understanding with that of their peers.

Narrative for Learning

Narrative centered learning environments can help students sustain their concentration, interest, and sense of immersion in a given learning task (Rowe et al., 2011). Although stories are not the truth, the storyteller submits their point-of-view to interrogation, a process that helps both the teller and receiver of the story to arrive at what really happened (Bruner, 2003). In this project, students must create a "master" story by accommodating often conflicting perspectives and evidence from their peers.

Microworlds

A microworld is as a simple but complete working model of a real system that encourages students to discover and explore. Seymour Paper coined this term to describe the robotic turtle he created to help children learning computer programming. In this project, Google Earth becomes a microworld where students live inside of and embody the world and they play out their emerging understanding of ancient societies and they conduct their research.

Narrative-centered learning environments

In this project, students play a "game" that is in context of their learning goal, which includes built-in instructions, and where students have fine grain control in game. When these features are present, student are more likely to sustain concentration, interest, and sense of immersion in a given learning task (Rowe et al., 2011).

Semiotics and Play

Symbols are powerful tool for learning because they allow learners to engage with what they represent and ignore what they represents to make new connections (Ackermann, 2013). In this project, students can use a map icon of a pick-axe and mountain can represent a goldmine but they can also use the icon as a portal for information or a way to travel to other destinations on the map.

User Testing

"Your project would fit right in with my course"

I tested this prototype with a cultural anthropology professor at a mid-western community college. I was encouraged to find that this user thought my approach would fit right into her World Cultures course. Below is a summary of the insights I gleaned from the interview.

"Student love anything interactive"

"Students writing an essay or doing a presentation doesn’t do much for them. They don’t get the context. Especially economics is hard for them to understand. with interactive experiences, they connect better with the material, are able to remember it and get concepts."

"Narrative is a big part of how I see anthropology"

"To get the local understanding, anthropologists have to get people to tell them stories. What’s interesting is how people change their stories based on who they are talking to. Analyzing those differences can help us understand cultural normativity."

"I would ask students to read ethnographies and map the story points."

This semester, I'm teaching the book Sleeping Rough in Port au Prince. Right now they are writing a paper. Instead of writing paper, I would have them put the narratives from the book — which is already written in these vignettes — and instead map those story points around a map of Haiti.

Sources

Reader, John. "Africa. A Biography of the Continent, Vintage." New York (1997).

Anderson, L.W. (Ed.), Krathwohl, D.R. (Ed.), Airasian, P.W., Cruikshank, K.A., Mayer, R.E., Pintrich, P.R., Raths, J., & Wittrock, M.C. (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (Complete edition). New York: Longman.

Bruner, Jerome Seymour. Making stories: Law, literature, life. Harvard University Press, 2003.

Gee, James Paul. "What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy." Computers in Entertainment (CIE) 1.1 (2003): 20-20.

Ackermann, Edith. "Constructing knowledge and transforming the world." A learning zone of one's own: Sharing representations and flow in collaborative learning environments 1 (2004): 15-37.

Booker, Christopher. The seven basic plots: Why we tell stories. A&C Black, 2004.

Smith, Patricia L., and Tillman J. Ragan. Instructional design. John Wiley & Sons, 2004.

Mayer, Richard E. "Cognitive theory of multimedia learning." The Cambridge handbook of multimedia learning 3148 (2005).

Rowe, Jonathan P., et al. "Integrating learning, problem solving, and engagement in narrative-centered learning environments." International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education 21.1-2 (2011).

Heer, Rex. "Revised Bloom’s taxonomy." Iowa State University Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching: http://www. celt. iastate. edu/teaching/effective-teaching-practices/revised-blooms-taxonomy (2012).

Reiser, Brian, and Iris Tabak. "Scaffolding." The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences, Second Edition. Cambridge University Press, 2014. 44-62.

Renkl, Alexander. "16 The Worked Examples Principle in Multimedia Learning." The Cambridge handbook of multimedia learning (2014): 391.

Ainsworth, Shaaron. "20—The Multiple Representation Principle in Multimedia Learning." The Cambridge handbook of multimedia learning 464 (2014).

Dirksen, Julie. Design for how people learn. New Riders, 2015.

Launch the Prototype

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