The combined method has proved to provide several learning advantages in educational projects, namely:
- understanding of and empathy towards other races and cultures is increased;
- auditory processing skills and listening skills are supported and practiced;
- memory is enhanced and attention spans are extended;
- factual and conceptual curriculum material is effectively and efficiently taught.
Although storytelling was an efficient model of education, with the development of the industrial society it became less popular and today we are faced with “uniform” education approaches in schools, with less creativity and uninteresting stories, contributing to hinder the student’s imagination.
Web 2.0 services provide great communication tools which are able to support modern storytelling in a more efficient way. Blogging, video sites like YouTube and much of what’s happening in social networking is driven by the basic human need to tell and share stories. New websites are emerging to help storytellers overcome the limitations of one dimensional media - text (blogs) or video (YouTube). Personal accounts shared in sites like Flicker, PhotoShow and others are trying to take storytelling to the next level. Although the online storytelling is just getting started it could be very efficiently used in eLearning.
In this paper we describe three projects: The TALE project, where we encourage people to learn by listening stories about successful learning experiences; HiStory, where older people are telling stories about life in the 20th Century in Europe and uploading them to the web, and MobiBlog, where students are submitting chronicles about their experiences studying abroad.
