Andrew Piper writes: "Reading has traditionally been imbedded in aural practices of reading aloud," which serves as a reminder that Storyline Online is not some blasphemy of correct book usage, but rather a digital version of the origins of reading. Books can be silent, but they don't have to be. Piper mentions that his own reading experiences at home were definitely verbal ones. I can relate: hardly a day went by in my childhood where someone did not sit me down with a book and read to me. And look where I ended up.
I think Storyline Online does a good job bridging the gap between physical books and digital books all while remaining accessible for children. The concept of a physical book is by no means obsolete - we can watch the reader turn pages as we know them, but the illustrated sequences don't attempt to animate page turning. Instead they pan across, more like a person's eye would when looking at a page. There is definitely an attempt to keep the purity of hard-copy books with pictures while also taking advantage of the animation possibilities digitization provides. It's subtle.
Here's an important point: there is no text. At all. Beyond the title page of the book, the whole experience is visual and auditory, but not textual. And while I guess I would technically call this a literacy initiative, a child could not learn to read while using this website. They might learn to love books and to enjoy stories, but learning to read is not the goal.
Even the home page is designed for those who cannot yet read. A child can choose a book based on the cover alone. Rolling the mouse over a cover displays information about who reads the story, but no description of the book itself. Just interacting with the site is primarily a visual - and not a linguistic - experience. At the same time, it took me for ever to notice that there was no text. I was so caught up in the experience of being read to, and so engaged in the charming illustrations. And maybe it doesn't matter whether or not there is text.
Piper also discusses the role of "Page as Window," which I believe is primarily what is going on in Storyline Online. "Pages allow us to look through, to transport ourselves into an imaginative space off the page," says Piper. In this context, there are several layers to this idea of windows: we understand the page as the reader in the video experiences it, as well as the video screen as a window. When the shot switches from the reader to the illustrations, there is a moment of "down the rabbit hole" as it were, of tumbling through the screen into the story itself.
What I like is that Storyline Online doesn't try to be a book. The program is fully aware that books form the bedrock, but up from there it's a digital experience. I guess the only part I'm worried about is that there are children using this website because their parents or guardians don't read to them for whatever reason. But in that case, better Storyline Online than nothing.
Sources:
http://www.storylineonline.net/
Piper, Andrew. "Turning the Page (Roaming, Zooming, Streaming)." In Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times. University of Chicago Press, 2012.
This is a really interesting find. I like how you tied it to the origins of reading. We tend to forget how much of a listening exercise reading used to be. For example, how university lectures in the Middle Ages were just that, classes attending a reading which they copied. If you approach Storyline Online from the framework of a different kind of reading or way of engaging with a book, it really does seem to promote literacy rather than just entertainment. Before I got to the end of your post, I also shared the worry you laid out about computers standing in for real people when it comes to early reading.
ReplyDeleteHere's another interesting aspect of the site (which I didn't bring up in my post because it's not really relevant to the innovative pages theme): when the story is over, the reader takes a moment so share some thoughts about the book. Something like "I really like that story about the lion in the library. Maybe you can go to the library and spend some time listening to other stories there or just reading books on your own." At first I thought it was a little preachy, but thinking about it, I remember having those conversations with people who read me books as a kid. Storyline Online took the time to include that essential post-reading talk-back. I'm still worried about computers as surrogate parents, but nonetheless a neat idea.
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