A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, March 23rd, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135
“The Design and Use of StoryKit: An Intergenerational Mobile Storytelling App”
by BETH BONSIGNORE
Today’s mobile devices are natively equipped with multimedia means for families to capture and share their daily experiences. However, designing authoring tools that effectively integrate the discrete media-capture components of mobile devices to enable rich expression remains a challenge. This presentation will provide a brief overview of collaborative technologies that support children’s storytelling, with a focus on mobile applications. It will detail a 4-month study on the observed use of StoryKit, a mobile interface that integrates multimodal media-capture tools to support the creation of multimedia stories on an iPhone/iPod Touch. The primary objectives of the study were to explore the ways in which applications like StoryKit enable families to create and share stories; and to investigate how the created stories themselves might inform the design of, and learning potential for mobile storytelling applications. Its results suggest that StoryKit’s relatively simple but well-integrated interface enables the creation of vibrant, varied narratives. Further, its portability supported the complementary co-construction and spontaneous, playful capture of stories by children and their trusted adults.
BETH BONSIGNORE is a doctoral student at the University of Maryland’s iSchool and a graduate research assistant at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), the Center for the Advanced Study of Communities and Information (CASCI), and the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL). At MITH, she has enjoyed being a member of the talented Developers’ Cohort guided by MITH Associate Director, Doug Reside, and has been involved in database design for Shakespeare’s Quartos and TheatreFinder, a collaborative interface for scholars and aficionados of historic theatres. Supported by an NSF EAGER grant under the direction of Kari Kraus (iSchool/ARHU) and Derek Hansen (iSchool/CASCI), she is exploring the potential of Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) to support the design of collaborative technologies for education. Participatory design work with Allison Druin and the HCIL KidsTeam, a group of children aged 7-12 working to develop new technologies, is an integral part of her research, which lies at the intersection of New Media Literacies studies, technology development for collaborative sensemaking and storytelling, and social analytics for communities of learning.
Coming up @MITH March 30th: Nick Chen and Kari Kraus, “Prototyping a Dual-Display e-Reader in the Literature Classroom”
View MITH’s complete Fall Speakers Schedule here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20100608231200/http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/mith_speakers_spring_2010.pdf
All talks free and open to the public!
Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (www.mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).