Web-based Learning Solutions for Communities of Practice

Using Storytelling as the Pedagogical Model for Web-Based Learning
expanding these down to a level where the story
units are close to being the Movements.
Phase 2: Generation Plot: Generate one or
more Story Plots by choosing well-linked Movements.
Phase 3: Create Storyboard: Develop the
Narrative as a Storyboard by representing Movements
with iconic multimedia elements.
Phase 4: Select Multimedia Content: Select
the required content including text, videos, images,
graphics, and sounds.
Phase 5: Authoring Story Content: Author
the story as a multimedia presentation by instantiating
the story plot linked into a narrative with
multimedia elements.
Creative input is required in each of the five
phases articulated for story development. However,
Phase-1 and Phase-2 are critical in getting
the story right. Because, if the story plot is not
engaging, no matter what flashy content and
technical gizmos are used, the final product will
be sub-optimal.
There are many systems and tools available
for storyboarding, content storage, and authoring;
however, presently, what is missing in the
current crop of web-based tools is the ability to
generate effective plots and narratives, given an
idea or a set of concepts that need to be linked
into a good story. Therefore, in the following
the focus is on principles for developing good
story plots.
Using McKee Principle for
Story Plot Development
McKee (1998) has articulated the principles for
creating emotionally moving story plots. While
these principles have been given for creating
fictional stories, they can also be used to create
engaging educational stories (Sharda, 2007). An
engaging story experience comes about by moving
human emotions (Sharda, 2006), therefore we
need to focus on creating emotional movement to
make the story engaging.
McKee defines the concept of emotional
charge as the level of built-up emotions. Positive
Emotional Charge can be associated with feelings
such as being happy, satisfied, and elated. In the
context of an educational story this could imply
a feeling of accomplishment on acquiring new
knowledge, or realizing the connections between
different areas, or discovering how to apply newly
gained knowledge (Sharda, 2007).
Negative Emotional Charge can be associated
with emotions such as anxiety due to the lack of
knowledge about some new concept, or confusion,
possibly in the face of contradictory facets
encountered in some knowledge area.
To keep the listeners engaged, emotional charge
must move up and down (McKee, 1998); this
must happen even in an educational story (Sharda,
2006). This emotional movement is represented
in figure 3 as the arrows pointing up and down
alternately, as the transmission of knowledge
advances going from left to right. The arrows
representing Emotional Charge form a Narrative
Envelope around the core knowledge, which helps
to move the knowledge transmission agenda, by
engaging the viewer’s emotions.
To be able to move emotions incessantly, Mc-
Kee suggests that a story should have five stages:
Inciting Incident, Progressive Complications,
Crisis, Climax, and Resolution. These concepts
have been articulated originally for fictional
stories; however some of these can be used for
creating effective educational stories as well, as
articulated in the following.
1. Inciting Incident is an event that gets the
story going. It is often the main problem that
needs to be solved. This construct is useful
for finding good beginnings.
2. Progressive Complications are needed
to keep the listeners emotionally engaged.
To achieve this, every problem that gets
solved should raise another. McKee (1998)
describes it as the Law of Conflict: “…
conflict is to storytelling what sound is to
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