Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Lessons learned
The research done with SAGE showed that children in very different situations
used this identity construction environment to explore aspects of their inner
lives through the creation of stories and storytellers. While expressing their
feelings by telling personal stories and listening to inspirational stories, chil-
dren learned about themselves. While designing conversational interactions in
which other people could participate, they also learned about others. SAGE's
design engaged young people in learning about identity, as well as develop-
ing narrative and computational intelligence. However, it did not support fur-
ther explorations of how a community shares narratives, nor how identity is
constructed in a social context. Neither were kids engaged in exploring val-
ues through concrete actions. They only used them to label and categorize
stories. Since all of these elements are important to develop a well-grounded
sense of self, I decided to design a second generation of identity construction
environments.
Kaleidostories: A web-based narrative experience
Kaleidostories is a web-based identity construction environment that focuses
on the use of narrative to explore role models and values in the context of an
on-line community. Every participant in the community is represented by a
geometrical figure in the kaleidoscope displayed in the right top corner of the
screen. The figure's color and shape changes according to how many role mod-
els and values are shared between the logged user and the other participants.
The kaleidoscope allows visualizing community patterns of shared role mod-
els and values (see Figure 2). Kaleidostories runs in an NT Java-based Web-
server and it is implemented in Java. Data entered by the children is stored and
recovered from a database using Java servlets. The patterns visualized on the
kaleidoscope are generated at run-time by queries to the database (Bers 1998).
The system guides users in the creation of a personal on-line portrait with
narratives about the present - “who am I?” - and narratives about the future -
“Who or what do I want to become?” It also guides them in the creation of
role models. Children can either choose their role models from a library or
create their own and add them to the already existing list. The system asks
them to write stories involving role model's biographical information as well
as narratives of personal identification, such as “why did I choose this person as
my role model?” and “what are the values that I admire about him or her?” The
