Affordances for learning in a non-linear narrative medium

A multimedia CD makes an impressive resource for the scholar-researcher, but students unfamiliar with the subject-matter may not always work so effectively with such a resource. Without any narrative structure, how does the novice cope? The paper describes how we are investigating the design features that 'afford' activities that generate learning: What are the design features that encourage students to practise the role of the scholar? What encourages them to explore, but also to reflect on their analysis of the data they find? What kind of learning takes place when students are allowed to explore at will? The paper goes on to compare the learning experiences of students using commercial CDs with those using material with contrasting designs, in an attempt to identify the design features that afford constructive learning activities. It concludes with an interpretation of the findings, comparing them with work in related educational media, and situating the findings in the context of a conversational framework for learning

Narrating the archive and archiving narrative: the electronic book and the logic of the index

The creation of my hypermedia work Index of Love, which narrates a love story as an archive of moments, images and objects recollected, also articulated for me the potential of the book as electronic text. The book has always existed as both narrative and archive. Tables of contents and indexes allow the book to function simultaneously as linear narrative and non-linear, searchable database. The book therefore has more in common with the so-called 'new media' of the 21st century than it does with the dominant 20th century media of film, video and audiotape, whose logic and mode of distribution are resolutely linear. My thesis is that the non-linear logic of new media brings to the fore an aspect of the book - the index - whose potential for the production of narrative is only just beginning to be explored. When a reader/user accesses an electronic work, such as a website, via its menu, they simultaneously experience it as narrative and archive. The narrative journey taken is created through the menu choices made. Within the electronic book, therefore, the index (or menu) has the potential to function as more than just an analytical or navigational tool. It has the potential to become a creative, structuring device. This opens up new possibilities for the book, particularly as, in its paper based form, the book indexes factual work, but not fiction. In the electronic book, however, the index offers as rich a potential for fictional narratives as it does for factual volumes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR

Narrative evolution: Learning from students' talk about species variation

Learners do not always enjoy productive interactions with Multimedia Interactive Learning Environments. Their attention can be distracted away from the educational focus intended by designers and teachers through poor design and operational inadequacy. In this paper we describe a study of groups of learners using a multimedia CD-ROM research tool called Galapagos. This tool was developed to enable us to observe groups of learners interacting with different versions of the same multimedia content. These different versions implemented different forms of guidance for learners both within the presented narrative structure of the material and in the tools offered to learners to help them build the individual content elements into a coherent whole. Our empirical work was conducted with groups of learners within their educational establishment using the Galapagos CD-ROM as part of their studies for national examinations in Biology. Their sessions with Galapagos were recorded using video and audio and our analysis of their dialogue has enabled us to gain a greater understanding of the factors that contribute to productive, educationally focused learning interactions. Through the construction of different representations we have been able to coordinate information about interactivity between learners and system at the interface with interactivity between individual learners within the group around the system interface. Varying the quantity and quality of guidance impacts upon the trajectory learners construct through multimedia content; it also influences the manner in which they use the facilities provided by system designers to assist them in their construction of task answers

Coherence compilation: applying AIED techniques to the reuse of educational resources

The HomeWork project is building an exemplar system to provide individualised experiences for individual and groups of children aged 6-7 years, their parents, teachers and classmates at school. It employs an existing set of broadcast video media and associated resources that tackle both numeracy and literacy at Key Stage 1. The system employs a learner model and a pedagogical model to identify what resource is best used with an individual child or group of children collaboratively at a particular learning point and at a particular location. The Coherence Compiler is that component of the system which is designed to impose an overall narrative coherence on the materials that any particular child is exposed to. This paper presents a high level vision of the design of the Coherence Compiler and sets its design within the overall framework of the HomeWork project and its learner and pedagogical models

‘For recuperation’: elegy, form, and the aleatory in B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates

B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates (1969) is British fiction's predominant attempt to embrace aleatorism and to subvert linear causality: the chapters are unbound, and the text invites the reader to shuffle them before reading. Narrative can be understood as a means of containing the ever-present risk of death, of disease, of loss, and has as its impetus a curative trajectory: recuperation is, perhaps, implicit in narrative. The Unfortunates, however, defiantly refuses such comfort. Johnson, this essay asserts, uses his form to cancel the consolations of narrative construction, taking the infectious chains of narrative and repudiating any doctorial/authorial urge to trace the spread of disease/narrative. The anti-linear narrative is inextricable from the type of mourning it enacts, and from the aetiology of the disease that it displays, but declines to track: a type of mourning that refuses movement through time, and the story of a disease that refuses to certify its own development. These refusals, I suggest, are embedded in the grammar and syntax of Johnson's prose. In The Unfortunates the full stops are nodal points of anxiety and loss, an expression of the novel's mortal anxiety. Johnson's final, missing full stop, the novel's aterminal terminus, offers a defiant refusal of recuperation of any kind

Conceptualisation of intellectual capital in analysts’ narratives: a performative view

Purpose: This study tests the performativity of Intellectual Capital (IC) from the perspective of sell-side analysts, a type of actor who consumes and creates IC information and in whose practice IC information plays a significant role. Design/methodology/approach: The empirical component of the study comprises a narrative analysis of the text of a large corpus of sell-side analysts’ initiation coverage reports. We adopt Mouritsen’s (2006) performative and ostensive conceptualisations of IC as our theoretical framework. Findings: We find that the identities and properties of IC elements are variable, dynamic and transformative. The relevance of IC elements in the eyes of analysts is conditional on the context, temporally contingent and bestowed indirectly. IC elements are attributed to firm value both directly, in a linear manner, and indirectly, via various non-linear interrelationships established with other IC elements, tangible capital and financial capital. Research limitations/implications: This study challenges the conventional IC research paradigm and contributes towards a performativity-inspired conceptualisation of IC and a resultant situated model of IC in place of a predictive model. Originality/value: This is the first study to apply a performative lens to study IC identities, roles and relationships from the perspective of a field of practice that is external to the organisation where IC is hosted. Examining IC from analysts’ perspective is important because not only can it provide an alternative perspective of IC, it also enables an understanding of analysts’ field of practice

Narrative in design development

This paper describes the value of narrative used with ideation tools in aiding the rapid production of product concepts and designs for masters students of graphics, fine art, product and industrial design. The ideation tools used alongside narrative included elements of divergent and convergent thinking in combination with reverse engineering and functional analysis, and practical prototyping using a range of readily adapted artefacts. Narrative was introduced and used by the students in order to ensure the development of a context and purpose for the product, artefact or system developed or proposed and to stimulate original product concepts, ideas and thinking. The concept of narrative is familiar in design. Here however the concept was reinforced using structures associated with fictional narrative. Reverse engineering exploring the deconstruction and identification of function for each component in a product was used to aid students ensure practicality in their idea implementation. This paper describes positive experiences resulting from this activity, with a particular focus on the value of narrative in developing robust concepts. The use of physical prototyping provided tangible and instant feedback for divergent and convergent phases of idea development

Sustaining entrepreneurial business: a complexity perspective on processes that produce emergent practice

This article examines the management practices in an entrepreneurial small firm which sustain the business. Using a longitudinal qualitative case study, four general processes are identified (experimentation, reflexivity, organising and sensing), that together provide a mechanism to sustain the enterprise. The analysis draws on concepts from entrepreneurship and complexity science. We suggest that an entrepreneur’s awareness of the role of these parallel processes will facilitate their approaches to sustaining and developing enterprises. We also suggest that these processes operate in parallel at multiple levels, including the self, the business and inter-firm networks. This finding contributes to a general theory of entrepreneurship. A number of areas for further research are discussed arising from this result

‘“Be vewy vewy quiet. We’re hunting Wippers.” A Barthesian analysis of the construction of fact and fiction in Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell

“I made it up and it all came true anyway” says the pseudo-psychic Mr Lees in the prologue to From Hell. However, it seems that this statement applies equally to the Jack the Ripper saga as a whole, whose contradictory stories and elements have been mythologised by the passage of time. This article considers the factional tale presented by Moore and Campbell in From Hell; a story largely based on Stephen Knight’s The Final Solution, a publication that has been marketed as both a serious exposé and elaborate hoax. Using the narrative models of word and image proposed by Roland Barthes (in ‘The Structural Analysis of Narrative’, ‘The Rhetoric of the Image’, S/Z and The Pleasure of the Text), this article examines the essentiality of the comics medium in successfully conveying the duality of fact and fiction present in the Ripper myth. It initially examines the tropes and ideas used by the creators to illustrate Knight’s theory, specifically with reference to the psychogeographic notion of the city as a divided body (and the potential link to the superhero motif: where one half is the antithesis of the other), and the architecture of history (illustrating time as co-present rather than a linear progression). It identifies a common theme of duality in these symbols and notes the role of this duality in creating a tale that is located on the boundary between fact and fiction. The article proceeds to focus on the role of the comics medium in constructing faction. It will: - analyse From Hell’s model of co-present time in light of the comics medium’s depiction of time-as-space (where all moments are simultaneously present on the page) and relate this to Roland Barthes’s observations on the ‘chronological illusion’ of narrative; - address the notion of fictional seeing: considering the veracity of hand-drawn art (as opposed to photographic replication) with reference to Barthes’s model of the drawn image as a coded message; - discuss how the alternate worlds of comics (whose settings, while they may bear a resemblance to our world, are necessarily removed from the same both visually and by their fantastic nature) illustrate Barthes’s observations on the non-mimetic nature of narrative; - extend this discussion to the fiction of fonts (that may be lettered by hand while giving the appearance of computerisation, or vice versa); and how this further illustrates Barthes’s discussion of the fiction of the narrative voice; - examine the medium’s presentation of a fragmented narrative (in the spatial arrangement of panels that provides for both syntagmatic and paradigmatic reading opportunities and links) with reference to the writerly/readerly text, and Barthes’s identification of coexistent (horizontal and vertical) narrative relations. The article concludes by reviewing these points in light of Moore’s conception of fiction as a modern form of magic. It summarises the ways in which From Hell uses the comics medium to demonstrate the shared qualities of fact/fiction across narrative and image, and the ways in which the boundaries between the two can be blurred. It ultimately concludes that the qualities of the comics medium make it ideally suited to conveying such a blend as is observable in the Ripper mythos

Image [&] Narrative journal editorship (in 2 issues) - The story of things: reading narrative in the visual

Based on the conference convened by Carson & Miller to accompany their project The Story of Things, these two journal issues of Image [&] Narrative explore the relationship between narrative and the visual. Issue 1: ‘Introduction’, Carson & Miller Part 1 – Telling the Story of Things ‘Relating Stories’, Dr. Patricia Allmer ‘Scrapbook (a visual essay)’, Carson & Miller Part 2 – Object as Catalyst: the Potential for Narrative within the Artefact ‘Artefacts and Anecdotes’, Prof. Karen Bassi ‘Ephemeral Art: Telling Stories to the Dead’, Dr. Mary O’ Neill ‘Belongings’, Lucy May Schofield & Sylvia Waltering Issue 2: ‘Introduction’, Carson & Miller Part 1 – Visualising the Remembered Narrative: Archetype, Biography, Autobiography ‘Rephrased, Replaced, Repainted: visual anachronism as a narrative device’, Gyöngyvér Horváth ‘Lost Children, the Moors & Evil Monsters: the photographic story of the Moors Murders’, Helen Pleasance ‘Read You Like A Book: Time and Relative Dimensions in Storytelling’, Mike Nicholson Part 2 – Authoring and Reading the Sequential Narrative: Linear and Non-Linear Approaches ‘The Pre-Narrative Monstrosity of Images: how images demand narrative’, Dr. William Brown ‘Towards Ephemeral Narrative’, Jacqueline Butler & Gavin Parry ‘Signification Under Sentence: examining how the juxtaposition of verse with film affects narrative’, Dr. Pete Atkinso