Woven Stories: Collaboratively Authoring Micro Worlds via the Internet

Stories as microworlds provide an attractive and open environment for learning. They are easy to combine with almost any subject matter, and students can create them by their own, also in groups. Woven stories are composed of units or text passages called nodes. Thus, they can be represented visually as graphs on a display. Several authors can work on their common woven story simultaneously, by linking different plots together by joining nodes. A preliminary prototype of woven stories was implemented as a web site. Although a simple framework, it reveals the strength of stories as an educational resource and the value of a computer as a technique to enhance the learning process. Moreover, the concept of the woven stories is versatile enough to be applied in various kinds of educational settings. The prototype is available at http://www.cs.Helsinki.fi/group/stories/.