Do not confuse traits with facts. Ages, shoe sizes and job titles do not make an interesting character. Are they impulsive or thoughtful, trusting or suspicious, assertive or passive?

Elements in backstory and traits that really matter for the story need to be released slowly: through flashbacks, dialogue, or actions. This gradual discovery keeps learners intrigued and invested.

The expert advice emphasised the pivotal role of emotions and player self-expression in crafting interactive narrative, along with the importance of designing believable characters and meaningful choices. A comprehensive heuristics framework to craft ISL was developed based on the insights from this phase. Through iterative prototyping and reflection, the heuristics framework was evaluated and refined, and subsequently applied to the recrafting of a virtual patient for compassion training

While no statistically significant differences for narrative transportation were found, the results from the playthrough data and open-ended questions demonstrated that incorporating emotional depth into virtual patient design significantly impacted learner engagement and empathy. Participants exhibited more compassionate care when interacting with the recrafted virtual patient, showing highly improved decision-making to promote patient outcomes.

Excellent choice design will increase the engagement of your learners in the story, intrigue them about consequences and entice them to replay to check out other paths.

Choices in branching scenarios consist of three closely interconnected parts:Framing: the information the learner uses to make the choiceOptions: the possible choicesOutcomes: what happens due to choosing one of the options.

Choices can offer diverse acceptable ways to achieve the same goal, giving learners opportunity to personalise the experience.

An extra path can also replace boring “try again” situations: the consequence shows your choice was not ideal, but you simply continue and get another chance further in the story to make a better informed, similar choice.

Clear and confined parameters help to make the choice feel integral to the context, while still leaving room for personal expression and emotional connection.

One of my favourite narrative designers, Jon Ingold from Inkle Studios, introduced the accept – reject – deflect model. For example, in a conversational choice where someone asks you a question, this could mean the following:Accept: continue the current conversation, e.g. simply answer the questionReject: react negatively or refuse to answer. Deflect: change the topic, e.g. ignore, bounce a question back or refocus attention

Exploring different perspectives in personal storytelling enriches the narrative by fostering a deeper understanding and empathy toward the characters and situations involved

<p>I admit to having overlooked <code>alt</code> text. Until a year ago I sniffed at the idea of creating useful <code>alt</code> text for images. “If a user is blind,” I reasoned, “what does he care that I have a photograph of the university tower on my website?”</p> <p>My fellow designer shrugged. “Well, I guess if you don’t really care about what the image <em>says</em>,” she said slowly, “you really don’t need it in the first place.”</p>

If I were writing a manifesto for 21st century teaching and learning, one of the items would be, “The 21st Century classroom does not teach writing — it teaches communication.”&nbsp;&nbsp;

When students know that anyone in the school with an Internet connection – or around the world, for that matter – can read what they have written or created, it is remarkable how quickly their thinking improves, not to mention the final product.

Laptops make it easier for students to edit their copy and make changes without getting writer's cramp, he said. As a result, students are writing and revising their work more frequently, which leads to better results. And it's important, Silvernail said, that those skills translated when the test was taken with pen and paper, too.

"It's just a lot easier to edit, to self-critique. Our teachers engage students in a lot of peer editing. Not only are they helping themselves, but they're helping each other as they get to their final projects," Rebar said.

In 2003, there was a study that showed that all this writing online was actually making kids <a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20030520/1943254_F.shtml">more comfortable</a> with writing in general. In 2004, a study showed (like this one) that with a little instruction kids easily <a href="http://www.techdirt.com/blog/wireless/articles/20041223/1427218.shtml">understood the difference</a> between texting and writing. In 2005, a study actually found that kids were <a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20051031/1836235.shtml">better writers</a> than in the past "using far more complex sentence structures, a wider vocabulary and a more accurate use of capital letters, punctuation and spelling" even if they sometimes let a txtism into their writing. And, in 2006, a study showed that students showed <a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060731/1938242.shtml">no ill effects</a> from widespread text and IM messaging.

Forty-seven percent of teen bloggers write outside of school for personal reasons several times a week or more, compared with 33 percent of teens without blogs. Sixty-five percent of teen bloggers believe that writing is essential to later success in life; 53 percent of non-bloggers say the same thing.

Most students (82 percent) believe that additional instruction and focus on writing in school would help improve their writing even further--and more than three-quarters of those surveyed (78 percent) think it would help their writing if their teachers used computer-based writing tools such as games, multimedia, or writing software programs or web sites during class.

The whole point isn't to *add* online writing on top of everything else you do. Nobody has time for that.<br><br>Rather, what you want to be thinking of doing is to gradually migrate to writing online *instead* of writing for those other purposes.<br><br>That doesn't mean you become a blog writer and nothing else. Rather, what you'll find is that writing for the website makes writing for all those other things a lot easier.

The idea is to take the stuff you do for private audiences and to present it (as much as you can) to public audiences.<br>

As a result, while N-Gens interact with the world through multimedia, online social networking, and routine multitasking, their professors tend to approach learning linearly, one task at a time, and as an individual activity that is centered largely around printed text (Hartman, Dzubian, and Brophy-Ellison <a target="_blank" href="http://www.webcitation.org/5Xw4B5bKP">2007</a>).

However, these digital texts do not necessarily lack style, coherence, or organization; they simply present meaning in ways unfamiliar to the instructor. For example, a collection of images on Flickr with authorial comments and tags certainly does not resemble the traditional essay, but the time spent on such a project, the motivation for undertaking it, and its ability to communicate meaning can certainly be equal to the investment and motivation required by the traditional essay—and the photos may actually provide more meaningful communication for their intended audience.

Texts that do not look like books or essays and that are structured in unfamiliar ways may leave educators with the perception that the authors of these texts lack necessary literacy skills. Are these students missing something, or are they coming to us with skills as researchers, readers, writers, and critical thinkers that have been developed in a context that faculty members may not understand and appreciate? The striking differences between the linear, print-based texts of instructors and the interactive, fluctuating, hyperlinked texts of the N-Gen student may keep instructors from fully appreciating the thought processes behind these texts. Learning how to teach the wired student requires a two-pronged effort: to understand how N-Gen student understand and process texts and to create a pedagogy that leverages the learning skills of this type of learner.

Annoyingly, just as complaints about literacy multiply, along comes a technology that has promoted a renaissance in reading and writing, yet it is treated with contempt by the ‘pen and paper’ brigade. Children don’t keep diaries any more – oh yeah! Haven’t you see MySpace, facebook and blogs. They’re obsessed by diary keeping.

It is accountable in immediate and unavoidable ways to readers and other bloggers, and linked via hypertext to continuously multiplying references and sources. Unlike any single piece of print journalism, its borders are extremely porous and its truth inherently transitory.

Logs require a letting-go of narrative because they do not allow for a knowledge of the ending. So they have plot as well as dramatic irony—the reader will know the ending before the writer did.

A novelist can spend months or years before committing words to the world. For bloggers, the deadline is always now. Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.

We can't "create" learning<br>- We can design environments conducive to learning.<br>- We design learning experiences.

Don't design CONTENT, design EXPERIENCES<br>- Design the "Flow".<br>- Start bringing in emotions and the actions they take

So basically when you blog, you have to think about what you have read, how that compares to what you already know or what you have experienced, and that comparison helps you to construct new mental models that you articulate in written form (your blog).