Learning technology today, particularly enterprise-wide online content management systems coupled with the internet provide huge amounts of information. While this is useful for learning, it lacks good narrative. Learners find it difficult to navigate disjoint information, and this affects learning outcomes. Typical elearning courseware is focused around individual topics, while often the challenge the enterprise faces requires knowledge from a variety of domains and functions to be learned and leveraged. Just like McKee’s principles that I mentioned in my last post, we need models or tools that can assist a process-driven creation of narratives for engaging learning.

Recently I made a presentation at IDCI about the basic differences between simulations and games, meant predominantly for beginner learning designers. At the end of the presentation I spoke about five ways to bring more gaminess into the learning interactions being designed by the IDs. One point I made was about the use of ‘narrative’ or ‘stories’. (I use them interchangeably, as they mean pretty much the same to me, perhaps wrongly.) While I ran out of time there, a nice discussion with great points about stories and storytelling being made. I wanted to quickly recap some important concepts I uncovered during my research about the use of narratives in learning.