About 18 months ago, I began getting a number of Google Alerts about Inanimate Alice, a digital fiction project which uses multi-media to tell a story through sound, image, text and video. Each episode is a self-contained adventure
and the story becomes increasingly game-like as it progresses. The alerts were drawing my attention to the publication online of episode five. And not just one episode five but several versions.
Which was interesting. Because I am the author of Inanimate Alice and I'd only produced four episodes.
In fact, a teacher in the US had been using the stories with her "hard to reach" class of teenagers who had created their own batch of multimedia episodes and uploaded them to the internet.
For me it was a really big moment: to have these students taking a piece of writing by someone else and engaging with it in an entirely new way is a very exciting form of interactivity.
I think that stories are a really useful teaching tool, regardless of the subject matter. And because under-16s are so engaged with things online and digital, bringing stories into that realm can interest children in writing and story-telling who think that it is perhaps not for them. That alone seems like a valuable thing from an education viewpoint.
Moreover, the internet has heralded an explosion of reading and writing and the formats children use – from instant messaging to Facebook – are all text-based forms of communication. Educators need to be harnessing this explosion of writing.
According to a recent report from social policy group OECD, the UK is lagging behind other, poorer countries in children's literacy standards. That may be so but I think perhaps we need to think again about what we understand by "literacy".
If you think about the long history of human storytelling, from the days of cave painting to the present, there is an evolution. The printed book is part of that evolution but I do think we need to be open to the idea that the book itself could be evolving. I don't mean simply that books are being converted to digital formats – I mean that the way that we read and interact with text and stories may well have changed fundamentally in 20 years' time.
The children in the US writing their own Inanimate Alice episodes are already doing it. They are redefining ideas of what authorship means, who owns the text, who is allowed to tell stories … there are real opportunities for learning there.
Kate Pullinger is a writer and lecturer in creative writing and new media at De Montfort University. Her digital fiction work, Lifelines, has been shortlisted for a Bett award at this year's Bett show (Olympia, London, 12–15 January 2011). She is also giving a seminar at the show.
