Forums

What: Story building through forums is a revealing way to work with narrative.

It's also an engaging way to work with teams building stories - a few students might build the start of a story, others work on the end, still others determine the central conflict. You can also engage in forum story building as a whole class.

Ease of use:

Students that are comfortable using email, cut and paste and opening tabs or multiple windows in a browser should be able to manage without difficulty.

Teaching with an existing text:

Discussions through a forum related to narrative are in themselves, a fundamental shift away from a traditional analysis of a text. It is an environment that is potentially less threatening, recordable (you can review a transcript after the discussion), and allows for links, references and quotes to be posted as students to further their arguments.

A forum also allows a discussion to progress with a select group of students in a classroom, while the rest of the class are engaged in other tasks.

Forums are great for story building. In my experience, students writing a story together using a forum find it to be fast paced and exciting. It's also a wonderful opportunity to introduce any manner of narrative elements before, during and after. 'Did you foreshadow that idea earlier?', 'Make sure you don't include too many characters, remember this is a short story', 'What's your source of conflict?' etc.

Update to this page:

Tiny Chat is a simple, straightforward chat service that's browser based, and worth considering when doing forum story building.

Cons: it's light on features, very light. But all the essentials are there. The main feature lacking for me was any sort of monitoring, so you can't police discussions. This of course means sabotage by a class member remains a possibility. For this reason, small group use is suggested for collaborative work.

Pros: it really is easy to use, with a learning curve of about 20 seconds. This makes it perfect for fast, small group discussions. With Tiny Chat in mind, you can get a collaborative discussion online underway in less than a minute.

Also worth noting, you can't save your work under an account as there's no login or registration. You can however, download a log of your chat for future reference. So if you need it, you'll have something to evaluate later!