Image from FlickR Courtesy of osiatynska

I had a great experience this week, I did a bit of old-school ‘training’ to a ‘group’ in a ‘workshop’.  I hadn’t thought about it but someone reminded me that this came almost a week after I’d been presenting about changing learner mindsets and, there I was, doing what I did 20 years ago.

Even if I was only linking learners then I see the time as valuable; what stood out most to me was the quality of storytelling on display.  I’ve believed in context over content in a classroom setting for a long time and linking learners, giving them time and space to reflect on their practice with others can be powerful.    Creating these groups can be difficult without a purpose (the workshop) so I’m happy to cede that this was necessary.

The storytelling the group delivered was very powerful; the subject was sickness absence, the group’s desire was to be consistent.  By recounting their stories, the group had space to agree consensus, relate their experiences and understand a general approach to ‘what good looks like’.

That then sent me off thinking about how the stories could be presented outside of this workshop.  The easiest answer is a form of wiki or blog but what can we do instead of text based stories?

I’ve written before about creating comics and still think they have value.  Donald Clark talked about podcasts and mp3 files as mobile learning last week; Pinterest can create stories through images.

What other storytelling is there?

As always, please let me know your thoughts below.  Also, if you’d like to be part of a group trying out learning tools, let me know via the comments box.