A story has a beginning, a middle and an end - or does it?

I've commented before on the new literacy tasks our children need to get their heads around when engaging online. Well Saturday I was hit again with how their world is different from ours.
Jon is a very skilled cartoonist and writer and has also been exploring gaming animation. He had made a birthday card for one of his friends on Friday and the elf he had drawn on the front was the kind of good that makes a suspicious mother ask if it was traced. "No Mum - I sketched it!" You can imagine the offended tone!
Saturday morning I walked into his room while he was playing Dark Chronicles (I think) on the PS2. He was in the middle of a storyline and not happy to be interrupted. As I stopped to watch what was on the screen it hit me that the "warrior prince" interacting with his avatar was clearly the model for his birthday card drawing. Somehow that computed with some stories he has been writing recently which are like variations on a first chapter of a book. I thought he'd been just exploring options until it hit me on Saturday that in the quest games he plays there are multiple variations on the entry point and he was in fact creating a story for a gaming world, not a book world.
That is kind of a mind blowing thought really - when we as adults tend to think if stories as linear with a beginning, a middle and an end, what does that mean to how we support children's learning? What could it mean to the future of books and story as we know them. A friend and I were discussing it the next day and both believed that the magic of a good story/book will always be with us - but it made me wonder.

A fresh start...

I was contemplating a fresh start with a new blog and but then when I came back to this one I realised that my posts from two years ago are still relevant to the things I want to say. So I thought I'd just start with a new post and a new commitment to writing.

There are a couple of things on my mind today - both to do with history and change.

Last night I had organised a "farewell" for a site we were about to decommission. Several people have commented to me on how interesting the short presentation I gave on the site's history was.

Several years ago our Masters class in education research had the good fortune to have Dr Neil Dalgliesh do a workshop on historical research. It captured by imagination and one of my regrets is that I didn't get to do his full paper as he was on sabbatical the following year. The consequence of that is I have always reviewed files and records with some respect and quite enjoy tracking back the story of a project through it's file.

For a number of reasons I had access to some wonderful archival files about this site. By putting together the pieces and some use of the Wayback machine I was able to pay tribute to what had been one of the very first education websites in New Zealand. So early was the site that the first discussions weren't even considering the internet as an option. It beat our Ministry of Education site by almost two years.

In the rapidly changing world of IT we dont often look back and reflect on the journey we have travelled or just how rapid that journey has been. The "quaint" early comments and questions from the feedback surveys on the prototype site were only 13 years old! Several of us were looking through the files later and exclaiming over the amount of handwritten notes. The question in my mind is that as most of us in IT are constantly looking towards the "next best thing" we forget that in the future others may want to know how we achieved what we did. What is all in a day's work for us is contributing to rapid social change and yet so much of our electronic world is disposable.

I'll leave my second thought for next time...