Narrative Strategies for Learning

Had a lovely time at the Learning Solutions Conference last week.  Did a full day pre-con on Gameful Learning Design with Rick Raymer, which was a lot of fun.

I also did a session on Narrative Techniques for Learning.  When I was working on Design For How People Learn, I listened a lot to a podcast on storytelling techniques.

A lot of learning and development folks *are* fiction writers, in the form of learning scenarios, examples and case studies, but (in my experience) it’s frequently pretty dull stuff (and I say this as someone who has written some dull scenarios myself).

So this session is about pulling some of the specific strategies that fiction writers use to into learning scenarios.  There are a lot of other interesting ways to explore storytelling in terms of meta-structures, psychology and cultural constructs.  This isn’t that presentation (though I’ll probably do that one too, one of these days).

This presentation is focused on specific strategies for making learning stories more interesting.

References:

• Storytelling podcasts: http://www.storywonk.com and http://popcorndialogues.com/
• The Hero’s Journey: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heros_journey
• Three Act Structure: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_act_structure
• Clark Quinn on narrative urgency: http://blog.learnlets.com/?p=2931
• Movie Cliches: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbhrz1-4hN4
• Article: Effects of humor on sentence memory. Schmidt, Stephen R. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Vol 20(4), Jul 1994, 953-967. doi: 10.1037/0278-7393.20.4.953
• TV Tropes: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HomePage
• Resonate by Nancy Duarte: http://www.amazon.com/Resonate-Present-Stories-Transform-Audiences/dp/0470632011
• Kathy Sierra on Building the Minimum Badass User: http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/kathy-sierra-building-the-minimum-badass-user-business-of-software-a-masterclass-in-thinking-about-software-product-development/