An enhanced concept map approach to improving children’s storytelling ability

Storytelling is an imperative and innovative pathway to enhance learning due to the fact that such activity prompts learners to reflect to construct meaning based on their observations and knowledge. Therefore, to develop and enhance students’ storytelling ability has become an important issue for both educators and researchers. Since storytelling involves complex cognitive processes, this study proposed an enhanced concept map approach featured with story grammars to help children develop stories. By gathering the stories developed by 114 third-graders, this study aimed to investigate whether the concept map approach can enhance their storytelling ability. It is found that the children, who used the concept map with story grammars, can develop stories with more complex structure, clearer subjects, more creative ideas, and abundant contents than those only using the concept map without the grammars. Such findings support that the concept map and story grammars can be an effective approach for developing learner-centered storytelling tools which help students develop and apply the knowledge about storytelling.     

Deliberate storytelling in big data analytics adoption

The emergence of big data analytics (BDA) has posed opportunities as well as multiple challenges to business practitioners, who have called for research on the behavioural factors underlying BDA adoption at the individual level. The purpose of this study is to extend the information systems (IS) research on storytelling and to explore the role and characteristics of deliberate storytelling in individual‐level BDA adoption. This case study used the grounded theory approach to extract qualitative data from 24 interviews, field notes, and documentary data. The explicit contributions of the study to the literature include (a) increasing our understanding of the facilitating role of deliberate storytelling in individual‐level BDA adoption, (b) identifying four deliberate storytelling patterns and seven underlying corporate stories disseminated by organizations to influence individual behaviour, and (c) defining the core characteristics of effective deliberate storytelling. This study has multiple implications for business practitioners and demonstrates how deliberate storytelling can be used as a facilitating mechanism in daily business practice.     

A storyteller's guide to problem‐based learning for information systems management education

More than a decade ago, evidence‐based recommendations emerged regarding what students of information systems (IS) management education should learn and how should they learn it. Although these recommendations for how IS management should be taught remain valid, they need to be updated to account for recent advances in technologies that enable multimedia learning. Promoters of such technologies promise enhanced cognitive and behavioural outcomes, but this promise remains unreached, reflecting the underdeveloped multimedia‐enabled learning literature. To help attain this promise and rejuvenate the literature of multimedia learning, we offer a roadmap for new areas of research that would inform the design and use of a novel form of multimedia materials: narrative animated videos (NAVs). NAVs represent a form of self‐determined learning that features immersive, story‐based content. We argue that their use will intrinsically motivate users to process the materials to completion, thereby enhancing cognitive and behavioural outcomes, and thus catalysing the effectiveness of the team‐based learning and self‐regulated learning modes for problem‐based learning (PBL) delivery of IS management education. This compelling roadmap corresponds to meaningful IS research because it centres on a topic that the IS literature has long examined—the role of user motivation—and because its theoretical contributions invite specific paths of research for informing the design of the PBL delivery of IS management education within an information systems artefact.     

Important characteristics of software development team members: an empirical investigation using Repertory Grid

An information system is typically developed by a team of information systems (IS) professionals. Research shows that teams staffed with the right people are more likely to be effective and efficient. There is a paucity of study that examines the important traits of IS professionals in team contexts. The objective of this research is to identify and understand the important characteristics of good team members in software development projects. We applied an established psychological technique (Repertory Grid) to guide our interviews with 21 experienced IS professionals, who have had extensive experience in software development teams. The comprehensive list of important characteristics was analysed qualitatively using open coding method of grounded theory. Fifty‐nine unique characteristics were identified and classified into eight categories. Among them, attitude/motivation, knowledge, interpersonal/communication skills, and working/cognitive ability were perceived by research participants to be the most important categories. Our study provides a context‐specific (i.e. software development team) evaluation of important characteristics of IS professionals. The results have significant implications for IS recruiting, IS training, IS staffing, and IS human resource management. Our study also supplements the research on management of IS development teams.     

“StoryWeb”: A storytelling‐based knowledge‐sharing application among multiple stakeholders

The research objective of this paper is to develop a storytelling‐based knowledge‐sharing application that enables users to co‐create their own stories for both individuals and groups. To address this, a design science research methodology was applied for elucidating users' requirements. As empirical evidence, a case study was conducted on the children's book industry to synthesize a knowledge‐sharing design application named “StoryWeb”. Usability tests were conducted to reconfigure users' feedback and suggestions after two StoryWeb prototypes were developed. This study makes three main contributions. First, it empirically tests individual's or group's creativity and co‐creation by a view of knowledge sharing. Second, it methodologically applies a design thinking approach into a knowledge‐sharing study. Third, it also practically suggests feasible guidelines for the creativity and innovation research community on which features of storytelling‐based applications can be configured.     

Uncovering hidden maps: Illustrative narratology for digital artists/designers

Interactive narratives have greatly changed our experience with story and storytelling. For a digital artist/designer, learning narrative techniques derived from fiction and film is crucial, as such techniques not only address the audience's reading/viewing habits but also are useful in breaking down a narrative into elements for the process of organizing/programming. This paper introduces an illustrative guide of narratology concepts for digital artists/designers, media students, and the like, and methods of uncovering the “hidden maps” in various kinds of narrative.     

Exploiting mobile contexts for Petri-net to generate a story in cartoons

Recently, various personal information in daily life is stored in mobile devices with sensors. This information reflects heterogeneous aspects of personal life history. People have a tendency to record precious memories from the information in their life. However, it is difficult to extract and summarize the memories from the information. There are many useful traditional ways, such as photograph, video and diary, to record important memories. Especially, writing a diary is beloved as an effective method for a long time because of its effectiveness, remembrance, and empathy of storytelling. This paper proposes a Petri-net based method that organizes mobile contexts to an understandable and interesting story in cartoons. Petri-net based storytelling approach reduces the uncertainty in mobile environment and increases the diversity and causality of a story. A generated story from mobile contexts is compared with personal life history for confirming the usefulness. Also, it is compared with the other method in previous work.     

Facebook,the Third‐Person Effect,and the Differential Impact Hypothesis

This study examined the effects of embedding and framing online news stories in social media contexts on perceived message influence and third‐person effects (3PE). 88 undergraduates at a Northeastern U.S. university participated in an online experiment in which they evaluated news stories posted on Facebook. A 4 x 2 mixed experimental design was used with the between‐subject variables of viewing condition (no Facebook frame, neutral Facebook, positive Facebook evaluation, and negative Facebook evaluation) and the within‐subjects factor of story relevance (Low, High). Results indicate that perceptions of personal influence increase in social media contexts for more personally relevant stories. These results are consistent with the Differential Impact Hypothesis.     

StoryCube: supporting children’s storytelling with a tangible tool

Storytelling is one of the effective methods used in education. Computer-aided storytelling allows children to create more free-form stories and provides a large amount of story materials. Grounded in the current related works, we design a tangible interactive tool, which supports children to interact with virtual objects via a tangible way instead of the usage of mouse/keyboard. With this tool, we also develop a storytelling system called StoryCube where children are able to create a 3D story environment and accomplish story narrations through physical manipulations to different virtual characters. From a preliminary user study, we find StoryCube full of playfulness, easy to learn and use, and somehow inspire children in storytelling activities.     

Multimodal Composing in Digital Storytelling

This study explores English language learners’ crafting process of a digital storytelling project in an instructional setting. By analyzing two English language learners’ digital storytelling projects and their personal crafting narratives, the researcher reports how these learners approach multimodal digital story composing, construct hybrid texts to deliver their messages, and assign meanings to the semiotic resources used in their digital story through Gunther Kress’ (2003) notion of design.Three major findings are reported in this study. First, participants approached the development of multimodal digital storytelling with the creation of a hybrid text, and with dialogic orchestration of multimodal resources. Second, participants’ digital story design and orchestration of multimodal resources were guided by author intents. Third, the study participants experienced imagination and re-imagination when assigning meaning to the semiotic resources used in their digital story. The incorporation of digital story composing narratives allows the researcher to develop deep understanding about multimodal designers’ thinking process in constructing their digital stories. The findings of this study, illustrating the complex process of multimodal composing, are discussed in relation to learners’ employment of multimodal resources, Kress’ (2003) notion of design, and Leo van Lier's (2004) notion of affordance.     

一个基于内容的新闻视频浏览和查询系统:NewsBR

提出了一个基于内容的新闻视频浏览和查询系统NewsBR，这个系统是建立在非常准确的新闻故事分段和主题字幕文本提取之上的，它的主要特征包括：基于类别的新闻故事浏览，基于关键帧的视频摘要和基于关键词的新闻故事查询，本文详细讲述了新闻故事的分段，主题字幕文本的提取和在此之上的基于内容的视频浏览和查询，这个系统对于全面了解新闻视频的内容很有帮助且行之有效．     

Applying a multimedia storytelling website in foreign language learning

Storytelling is a practical and powerful teaching tool, especially for language learning. Teachers in language classrooms, however, may hesitate to incorporate storytelling into language instruction because of an already overloaded curriculum. English foreign language (EFL) teachers in Taiwan report additional problems such as having little prior experience with integrating storytelling into language teaching, locating appropriate stories, and lacking the cultural and language abilities to handle storytelling in English. On the other hand, researchers have demonstrated successful usages of computer and network-assisted English learning. The researchers in this study have developed a multimedia Storytelling Website to study how web-based technology can assist overcoming the obstacles mentioned above. The website contains an accounts administration module, multimedia story composing module, and story re-playing module. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of this Website in significantly facilitating teacher’s storytelling and children’s story recall processes in EFL classrooms, it was implemented in one elementary school to test its effectiveness in instruction and in resultant student learning. The results of the study support the significance and the education value of the multimedia Storytelling Website on EFL teaching and learning. If such a Website can be applied within elementary EFL classrooms, the quality of teaching and learning can be improved and students’ enjoyment and success in EFL learning may increase.     

HIGH‐PRECISION BIO‐MOLECULAR EVENT EXTRACTION FROM TEXT USING PARALLEL BINARY CLASSIFIERS

We have developed a machine learning framework to accurately extract complex genetic interactions from text. Employing type‐specific classifiers, this framework processes research articles to extract various biological events. Subsequently, the algorithm identifies regulation events that take other events as arguments, allowing a nested structure of predictions. All predictions are merged into an integrated network, useful for visualization and for deduction of new biological knowledge. In this paper, we discuss several design choices for an event‐based extraction framework. These detailed studies help improving on existing systems, which is illustrated by the relative performance gain of 10% of our system compared to the official results in the recent BioNLP’09 Shared Task. Our framework now achieves state‐of‐the‐art performance with 37.43 recall, 54.81 precision and 44.48 F‐score. We further present the first study of feature selection for bio‐molecular event extraction from text. While producing more cost‐effective models, feature selection can also lead to a better insight into the complexity of the challenge. Finally, this paper tries to bridge the gap between theoretical relation extraction from text and experimental work on bio‐molecular interactions by discussing interesting opportunities to employ event‐based text mining tools for real‐life tasks such as hypothesis generation, database curation and knowledge discovery.     

A Web‐based resource model for scholarship 2.0: object reuse & exchange

Digital scholarship offers the opportunity to move beyond the limitations of traditional scholarly publication. Rather than limiting scholarly communication to text‐based static documents, the Web makes it possible for scholars to expose and share the full evidence of their research including data, images, video, and other genre of materials. These aggregations of evidence, or compound documents, can then be integrated into a linked data cloud, the basis of Scholarship 2.0—an open environment in which scholars collaborate and build new knowledge on the existing scholarship. We present Open Archives Initiative–Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI–ORE), a set of standards to identify and describe aggregations of WebResources, thereby making the Scholarship 2.0 vision possible. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.