Paul Oord: Storytelling as a Link between Formal Knowledge and Actual Performance in a Critical Transformative Design Environment

Paul opens by noting that he is a teacher, not a researcher, and often has to work with a small budget for projects, or rely on students.

One of Paul's projects was the idea of setting up a virtual company run by students - a constructivist approach to learning. Students would be employeers, customers or project managers, and would work with real customers, and real projects. This type of project was quite rare when he started running it in 2001.

This was a big change for students, who had to focus on a new, intensely practical way of learning. They had to act independently, occasionally complaining that "nobody tells us what to do!"

This created antagonism with their previous way of working and learning:

• Problems putting formal knowledge into practice
• A lack of discussion of methods and techniques
• No self-reflection (either individually or in teams)
• A desire to focus on technical areas to the detriment of others
• Problems learning to communicate well with customers, and each other

To attempt to improve this, Paul wants to implement a knowledge management process to aid communication and self-reflection. It was thought that the best way to do this would be to create a "critical transformative room... a space for a new shared understanding."

Paul took inspiration from the idea of 'story circles', and decided to use storytelling as the key to the knowledge management process. As with Oskana, Paul engaged in participatory design. The students developed their own procedure for storytelling and developed software to support it.

As a result, the student began to use this software to communicate in the form of stories. They would tell stories about their working process; their learning process; how they communicate; their roles in the workspace; even their life outside the university.

Stories could be published (so all students could see them) or kept private amongst friends. They could be submitted for review, and rejected or accepted for review by other students. They could also be retracted by the original authors. Any student could comment on anything that had been published. Some typical useful features were implemented, such as dynamic search and tagging stories with keywords.

The system supports the exchange of informal knowledge, and works well because it preserves the complexity and uncertainty of real life. Paul notes that this is an improvement over the standard learning environment, which can be too formal. It supports "negotiating constructed meanings".

In Paul's experience, the storytelling software has been accepted by students because they designed and made it themselves. It has been a useful way for students to divulge information they might be reticent to talk about via other means.

Question and answer session:

Krystina works with engineering students who do not always communicate well, and she thinks that this sort of thing is a very good way to provide a common platform of communication, through a familiar medium.