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Journal of Cultural Science
http://cultural-science.org/journal
Vol.8, No 2 (2015): Broadening Digital Storytelling Horizons 106
Digital Words of Wisdom?
Milia (AppleTree), An Online Platform for
Digital Storytelling
Manolis Spanoudakis,
1
Alexandra Nakou,
2
Eni Meliadou,
3
Dimitris
Gouscos,
4
Michalis Meimaris
5
Faculty of Communication and Media Studies, University of Athens, Greece
ABSTRACT
This paper introduces Milia (AppleTree), an open online platform for social interactive
digital storytelling, which has been developed by the Laboratory of New Technologies in
Communication, Education and the Mass Media, with the support of the University
Research Institute of Applied Communication (URIAC) of the Faculty of Communication
and Media Studies of the University of Athens. The Milia platform aims to support the
representation, presentation and collaborative creation of any sort of stories in digital
format. Applications of the platform can be found in storytelling per se, in education, in
publishing and, more generally, in the creation and publication of collaborative digital
works. The first part of the paper is focused on a state of the art review for digital
storytelling platforms and discussion of some major challenges that these platforms are
attempting to face. This review is followed by a second part, which discusses the
technical features and functional capabilities of the Milia platform in detail, and a third
part, which reports on applications of the platform that have already been realized and
digital stories that are already available online. The paper is concluded with a discussion
of limitations and directions of future work for the Milia platform.
1
MEd Information and Communication Technologies for Education, email: manspan@gmail.com
2
MEd Information and Communication Technologies for Education, email:
alexandranakou@gmail.com
3
MEd Information and Communication Technologies for Education, email:
eni.meliadou@gmail.com
4
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Communication and Media Studies, University of Athens, email:
gouscos@media.uoa.gr
5
Professor, Faculty of Communication and Media Studies, Director, Laboratory of New
Technologies in Communication, Education and the Mass Media, University of Athens, email:
mmeimaris@media.uoa.gr
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Vol.8, No 2 (2015): Broadening Digital Storytelling Horizons 107
Keywords: digital storytelling; interactive storytelling; storytelling and learning;
storytelling platforms; Milia platform
Milia (AppleTree), An Online Platform for Digital Storytelling
Manolis Spanoudakis, Alexandra Nakou, Eni Meliadou, Dimitris Gouscos, Michalis
Meimaris
1. Contextualization and objectives of the Milia development project in a
landscape of non-linear digital storytelling
Digital storytelling, according to Wikipedia,
“refers to a short form of digital media
production that allows everyday people to share aspects of their life story”
.
6
Indeed, this
statement incorporates an important part of the applications and scope that the practice
of capturing, creating and telling stories with the use of digital media has taken up today.
In all these applications that, beyond personal stories, encompass stories for
entertainment, stories for advocacy, stories for advertising, stories for learning and many
others, the way that storylines are structured (or, on the contrary, left less structured)
makes heavy use of the capabilities of the digital medium, which once more, becomes
itself the message. One of the more distinctive capabilities of this digital medium, beyond
its ability to simulate other media, from voice and writing to music and pictures, is its
flexibility to present the same contents in completely different sequences. Using digital
media, changing the way that a story is told from linear to non-linear is an absolutely
practical option, which often seems (and actually is) more engaging that the traditional
linear way of narrating. As a result, the landscape of stories told through digital media
becomes more and more a landscape of non-linear narratives.
7
In turn, the support of
digital storytelling platforms for non-linearity is no longer an advanced option, but a
basic requirement. This is especially true for new platforms for digital storytelling, such as
the Milia platform discussed in this paper, which are conceived and designed in a digital
environment where non-linear narratives (at least in the broader sense of hyperlinked
digital content) already prevail.
6
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_storytelling (last accessed on 06/12/2014)
7
Although this claim cannot be demonstrated through hard evidence, the emergence of non-linear narratives in
digital media is definitely a trend, which seems to have the potential of becoming prevalent; as a testimony to this, cf.
Wikipedia on the instances of non-linear narrative in video games
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlinear_narrative#Video_games, last accessed on 06/12/2014), which mentions
that “… by creating a nonlinear storyline the complexity of game play is greatly expanded. Nonlinear game play
allows for greater replay value, allowing the player to put together different pieces of a potentially puzzling
storyline”, as well as (ibid.) on HTML narratives.
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Vol.8, No 2 (2015): Broadening Digital Storytelling Horizons 108
To be sure, users were to a non-negligible degree familiar with a non-linear context
already long before the digital age, either in terms of having avidly read non-linear
entertainment, like books at a first stage, or in terms of watching films with non-linear
storytelling later on. The
in medias res
(in the middle of things) technique, where the
story is related by way of flashbacks rather than in a chronological order is an example of
what the audience has already been prepared for before the advent of digital media. 20th
century films have been experimenting with non-linear stories using different techniques
like parallel action (director Robert Altman), multiple points of view and no clear ending
(cf.
Rashomon
, by Akira Kurosawa), or even different outcomes within the same movie
(cf.
Run Lola Run
, by Tom Tykwer).
Nevertheless, the evolution of non-linear storytelling techniques has become much easier
using an inherently non-linear medium like web 2.0 digital storytelling platforms. Web
2.0 stories are broad. They can represent history, fantasy, a presentation, a puzzle, a
message. In this respect, narrativity is no more dependent on fictionality (Ryan, 2002).
Current online tools for digital storytelling use open structures in order to help users
create or launch stories. A major issue, in this effort, is how to design a platform that
integrates the user’s activity into a framework that respects the basic constitutional
elements of narrative, namely people facing a challenge, trying to overcome it through a
sequence of events and reaching a resolution (Ryan, 2002). Still, even if storytelling in
general, under the influence of digital media, is to move towards a non-linear model, such
a trend does not imply that this sort of narrative coherence is to be left out of the
equation.
Narratives flow through games, platforms and other digital tools widely accessible via the
internet, whereas at the same time listening to and reading stories moves forward from a
static activity to an interactive, dynamic process where the lines between the author and
the audience blur. In this context, an attempt to deploy an open platform for
communication reaching modern storytellers is that of Milia (AppleTree), an open online
platform for social interactive digital storytelling. The Milia platform
(http://www.media.uoa.gr/ntlab/milia) has been developed by the Laboratory of New
Technologies in Communication, Education and the Mass Media
(http://www.media.uoa.gr/ntlab), with the support of the University Research Institute of
Applied Communication (URIAC) of the Faculty of Communication and Media Studies of
the University of Athens.
The core ideas that underlie the conception of this platform are to provide users with the
ability for personal creation and social sharing of stories, together with the opportunity
for experimenting with the possibilities of the branching structure of the platform in
non-linear stories. Integrating creation and reading of stories in a non-linear way, the
user of the Milia platform is in a sense meant to be at the same time a reader and a
creator, as (s)he imports personal data and also reads the stories of others. One more
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Vol.8, No 2 (2015): Broadening Digital Storytelling Horizons 109
design objective of the platform is to be flexible and powerful enough so as to support the
representation, presentation and collaborative creation of any sort of stories in digital
format, with intended applications in storytelling per se, in education, in publishing and,
more generally, in the creation and publication of collaborative digital works. The vision
behind development of the Milia platform has been that of being able to offer to everyone
interested the means to “plant” a story and see it grow up into a fruitful tree, and thus
provide an online space where creators can make stories by planting their own trees, in
publicly accessible “digital fields” or in their own, private, “digital gardens”. In this way
the Milia platform is meant to enable the creation of a data bank of interactive stories,
which readers will have the capability to extend and enrich with their own ideas and
alternative versions, and thus offer itself as a new instrument at the service of free
expression, knowledge and creativity.
Milia is at the same time meant to serve as a useful educational tool. Students should be
able to use it, for instance, to create their own stories or read and amend the stories of
their classmates, thus having the opportunity to practice and develop their language skills
(grammar, syntax, vocabulary, expression), to become familiar with the art of story
making and storytelling, to learn and appreciate the teamwork that will be necessary for
creating and uploading their stories, and at the same time profit from hands-on
experience with computers, the internet and interactive multimedia applications.
Last but not least, apart from its educational and creative aspects, Milia is also intended to
offer itself as a medium for preserving stories and narratives from the past, thus
safeguarding the collective creations and memories of a community. The above
challenges, objectives and ambitions that have guided the conception and design of the
Milia platform can be considered, in a sense, to comprise a gap in digital storytelling
research and applications that this platform is intended to address.
Figure 1 presents a representative welcome screen from the Milia online platform. Every
apple tree holds a story, and the tree elements represent the story’s structure and
contents. Figure 2 presents a representative snapshot of Milia tree elements, storing
images and other multimedia content. All these elements can be uploaded and edited
online through a graphical interface that allows users of the platform to operate as story
creators. A sample screen from the Milia GUI is presented in Figure 3.
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Figure 1. Representative welcome screen of the Milia online platform.
Figure 2. A snapshot of Milia tree elements, able to store images and other multimedia content for
story elements.
2. An overview of digital storytelling platforms
A digital storytelling platform in general is supposed to fulfil three basic principles:
Collect data, edit and export a story. The difference is the level of freedom that such a
platform offers to users. The Milia platform, as mentioned above, aims to support the
representation, presentation and collaborative creation of any sort of stories in digital
format. A story seen in Milia is interweaving different media to support a central idea.
Users are linking and orchestrating different clues to build a meaning for the reader.
Since readers and users co-exist in this digital storytelling platform it is essential for their
creations to find their way to the audience in a non-linear yet coherent way.
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Figure 3. Sample screen from the online interface of the Milia platform for uploading and editing
story elements.
Other digital storytelling platforms that share the same principles of presenting a story
are briefly overviewed in the following. For this overview, which has been intentionally
designed as a selective rather than an exhaustive one, a small number of platforms has
been chosen of which each one is different from Milia in terms of features and
functionality, yet similar in terms of philosophy and overarching goals, offering at
varying degrees of support capabilities for (a) branching narrative structures, (b) social
sharing of stories, as well as (c) the organization of personal data in a new and compelling
way.
Still, given the current interest in digital storytelling and the proliferation of relevant
applications, it is worth noting that there are many more storytelling platforms and tools
that the interested reader could explore, and which have not been selected using the
criteria above. A Pinterest topic on storytelling platforms, for instance, lists more than 25
such platforms
8
, whereas educational technology sites provide many pointers to tools that
can be used for making stories based on user-generated content, and/or mashed-up
content available online, and/or predefined primitives and templates
9
.
2.1 Pearltrees
Pearltrees (http://www.pearltrees.com/) is a visual and collaborative content curation tool
that allows users to collect, organize and share URLs. Users can drag and organize
8
webpage https://www.pinterest.com/plotlines/storytelling-platforms/ (last accessed on
05/12/2014)
9
for instance, webpage http://elearningindustry.com/free-digital-storytelling-tools-for-teachers-
and-students (last accessed on 05/12/2014)
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collected URLs into units called pearls. Pearltrees users can synchronise their social
accounts with popular social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. A pearl represents a
link to a web page; yet at the same time it is more than that, operating as an interactive
object that users can move around their visual map. Users can share a pearl with others
who “pearled” the same content and discuss it. What is especially intriguing is that users
can view other users’ Pearltrees, which they can expand and explore at will. Pearltrees
give meaning to the users’ interests and help to structure their web explorations. The tree
structure helps by preserving a main theme of interests for each tree, whereas its
branches can underline the sense of continuity with other similar themes.
2.2 My Heritage
My Heritage (http://www.myheritage.com/) is a family-oriented social network
service and genealogy website. It allows logged-in users to digitally create their own
family tree websites. In this way, the traditional family tree can turn into an interactive
experience where family members share pictures and videos, organise family events,
create new family trees and search for their ancestors. The My Heritage platform has
become quite popular, reaching some 72 million users, and it is currently one of the
largest sites in the social networking and genealogy field. One of its most distinctive
features is the capability to search for family history through facial-recognition
technology.
The visual experience of the tree scheme on the MyHeritage platform can in a sense be
considered to represent a family story, which connects with other family stories. This
scheme of presenting a story is used in other platforms as well, along with other types of
structures like boxes, cubes as well as pin boards.
Figure 4. Snapshot of the Pearltrees platform.
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Figure 5. Snapshot of the MyHeritage platform.
2.3 Digital Vaults
The Digital Vaults website (http://www.digitalvaults.org/) represents more than a digital
display of photos, documents, videos and archives. It essentially provides a reading
experience in a non-linear way while at the same time, similar to other digital platforms,
it offers users the possibility of creating their own collections, games, posters and movies
with the database material of the National Archives. Visual materials of the National
Archives collections are displayed to users, and the interaction of the latter with
information records enables new material coming forward, in this way implementing a
surprising, informative and important form of storytelling. The Digital Vaults user
experience is strongly reminiscent of the views of researchers like Michael Joyce (excerpt
italicized for emphasis): “
Narration takes place in the mind of the viewer, as an
interpretation of the connections he makes throughout his digital storytelling experience
”
(Joyce, 1995). Each image contains historical information that can be added as captions.
The movie-making tool includes soundtrack options as well as basic editing facilities.
With a free login account, users can save their work, share it via hyperlinks or e-mail
their projects. Web 2.0 technology allows users to search the database both by keywords
and tags. Users can browse through the hundreds of photographs, documents and film
clips and discover the connection between some of the National Archives' most treasured
records. Digital Vaults represents an example of a constantly changing customary pattern
of narration as stories are presented in an open-ended, branching, hyperlinked, cross-
media, participatory, exploratory and unpredictable way (Alexander and Levine, 2008).
2.4 Museum Box
Museum Box (http://museumbox.e2bn.org/) is a tool for virtual displays of artifacts that
someone can use online. Museum Box can help building up an argument or describing an
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event, person or historical period by placing items in a virtual box. Users can put on
display text, files and movies, and the boxes created can be commented on by the other
users. The choice between 3-dimensional cubes and 2-dimensional images allows users to
change the viewers’ perception within a story.
Figure 6. Snapshot of the Digital Vaults platform.
Figure 7. Snapshot of the Museum Box platform.
2.5 History Pin
History Pin (http://www.historypin.com/) is an online user-generated archive of
historical photos, videos, audio recordings and personal recollections. Using locations and
dating the content allows users to “pin” it onto Google Maps. Where Google Street View
is available, users can overlay historical photographs and compare them with the
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contemporary location. In this way, History Pin has the potential of turning Google Maps
into a worldwide, communal, open-air “memory place”. It should be noted that the
method of loci (a way of memorising things by visualising them in locations) is quite
effective for many people.
Figure 8. Snapshot of the History Pin platform.
2.6 Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood
Creating stories by viewing a map or a photo of a place motivates people to share their
memory of this place. In this line of thought, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood platform
(http://mrbellersneighborhood.com/map) began publishing during spring 2000 and has so
far published over a thousand pieces of original writing. This site combines the approach
of a magazine with that of a map. It effectively uses the external, familiar landscape of
New York City as a way of organising the internal, often unfamiliar, emotional landscapes
of city dwellers.
Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood website publishes reportage, personal essays as well as urban
sketches. For the first five or so years of its operation, the front page of the site was based
on a satellite photograph of a map of Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn that was divided
into sections, each representing a neighborhood. Clicking on one of these sections allows
users to zoom into the corresponding neighborhood, with red dots linking to articles
about the location. In 2005, the platform started using Google Maps in colour, which can
be zoomed into and out of more easily and is generally more flexible and user-friendly.
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Figure 9. Snapshot of the Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood platform.
Figure 10. Snapshot of the Folding Story platform.
2.7 Folding Story
Creating a digital story with strong interactive elements sometimes necessitates tools that
are free (or, from another perspective, void) of scheme, with no specific graphical
environment and offer users the freedom to upload the material and to decide on the way
that it is going to be displayed. Folding Story (http://foldingstory.com/) is such a platform.
It functions as a group storytelling game where players write one line of a story, fold the
paper, and pass it on to the next player. It is a digital version of the classic classroom
collaboration story game, in which participants take turns to add the next line to a story
until the whole story is complete. However, each player can only see the last couple of
lines, and hence can have no idea about how the story has been going before that point.
This activity takes place on the Folding Story platform and users can read finished stories
(fold stories) or participate in unfinished ones.
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3. Features and capabilities of the Milia platform
Milia (AppleTree) is an open platform for social interactive digital storytelling. Its
implementation is based on the Spiral Model (Boehm, 1986), a software development
process combining elements of both design and prototyping in stages. Milia consists of
two main subsystems: the Storytelling Viewer (Figure 11) where internet users may view
posted stories (named AppleTree stories) and the Storytelling Editor where authenticated
users create AppleTree stories (Figure 12).
Figure 11. Storytelling Viewer interface of the
Milia Platform.
Figure 12. Storytelling Editor interface of the
Milia Platform.
The Milia platform uses an apple tree as the space where story elements are placed.
Elements can be of any media type (such as images, videos, sounds), but also text and
hyperlinks. For every story element there is a corresponding tree element icon hanging
from the apple tree as an apple, leaf or flower. Any combination is possible. For example,
an AppleTree story may consist of sound leaves, image apples, text flowers etc. When a
user clicks on a tree-element icon, the element expands and reveals the hidden content
(Figure 13). Every element has control buttons in order to be moved, closed, zoomed in
and zoomed out.
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The free placement of story elements on a tree, in contrast to the common practice of
using book pages or storyboards, offers the ability to access the story content in any order,
in a non-linear way. Milia also supports linear storytelling, using the tree element
description (Figure 14), a metadata text field where a story writer may give a short
description for the tree-element, and/or define its sequence in the story.
Figure 14. Metadata text fields for the description of story elements on the Milia platform.
In order to become a storywriter, a user should register in the corresponding webpage of
the Milia online platform. From the corresponding welcome screen (Figure 15), a writer
may create new AppleTree stories, and also enable (making publicly visible), edit, delete
or disable (making hidden from public view) existing ones.
Figure 13. Expanded tree elements on the Milia platform that reveal the corresponding story
elements.
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Figure 15. Welcome screen for a story writer.
When creating a new story, a writer fills in mandatory fields
Title
and
Description
,
whose values are stored in The Milia Database and can be altered at any time. These
metadata can be used for advanced searching. Loading elements includes picking a spot
from 50 predefined spots on the AppleTree structure, choosing an element type from
Text, Image, Sound, Video, Hyperlink
, and selecting a media type and a media file.
Element types are subject to format, encoding and size limitations. Text files, for instance,
need to be uploaded in .txt format, UTF-8 encoding and with a size limited to 100KB. At
the same time, there is also a limitation of 50 elements and a total content size of 50MB
per AppleTree story.
The “
Edit Appletree Story”
screen (Figure 16) displays a detailed view of the uploaded
content of a story. From there, a writer may add or change the element description,
change element type (from apple to leaf, for example), enable or disable an element from
being displayed on the AppleTree, delete the element or preview it.
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Figure 16. The interface for editing stories.
Last but not least, in order for Milia to be accessible to a wide range of audiences, care has
been taken to comply to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0)
provided by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C 2008). Examples include the
presentation of non-text content of the Milia interface with text alternatives, audio
control, resize text facilities, keyboard shortcuts for all functionalities and other similar
features.
A more detailed description of the Milia features and functionalities can be found on the
platform’s website, which is also available in English.
10
4. Educational projects using the Milia platform
The potential applications of the Milia platform can be found in storytelling per se, in
education, in publishing and, more generally, in the publication of collaborative digital
works.
Particularly in the domain of education, constructionists underline that young users can
benefit from systems that are open-ended and support creativity and self-expression given
that children (and adults, we may add), “
learn by making
” (Harel and Papert, 1991).
Milia, as an online digital space for interactive storytelling, can also serve – among other
10
http://www2.media.uoa.gr/medialab/milia/index.php?lang=en
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functions – as a useful educational tool. Schoolchildren can use it, for example, to create
their own stories or read and process their classmates’ stories. As simple as they may
seem, however, such activities can have important learning implications and outcomes:
a. A storymaking activity provides a way to practice and develop language skills
(grammar and syntax), become familiar with the art of mythmaking and
narration, as well as an opportunity to learn and appreciate teamwork, given that
students are required to work in teams in order to invent and upload their stories.
b. At the same time, students can profit from hands-on experience with computers,
the internet and multimedia applications.
c. Last but not least, students, like adults, can best learn the basic structure of a story
by creating one, as well as learn how to present a subject by organising the main
and secondary ideas around it upon the branches of a tree.
Along these lines of thinking, a number of educational interventions in formal school
settings using the Milia platform have already been organised in collaboration with the
authors. As of June 2013, Milia hosts some 50 stories mostly created by students of
primary and secondary education. The stories present a variety of narrative formats,
ranging from simple linear stories like fairy tales to more open-ended stories with non-
linear structure.
In the following sections, three representative stories selected from those that have been
deployed within educational interventions based on the Milia platform are briefly
presented.
4.1 Story #1: Miliada
“Miliada” (Figure 17) is a story created by a group of 12 adolescent students named
“cinephiles”. All group members are high-school students of the 9th High School of
Athens, Greece, and the group collaborated outside the formal schooling hours. Group
meetings were held at the computer lab of the school where there was just one computer
accessible to students and connected to the internet.
“Miliada” is not a traditional fiction-based story with a beginning and an ending, but
rather a narration that a user can read choosing his own path through the branches of the
tree. It essentially represents a quest to search for the presence and symbolism of the
apple in every aspect of human life through the years. The story reader departs from
The
Judgement of Paris
, the famous 17th century painting of Rubens, and must choose,
undertaking the role of the mythical Paris, a goddess to follow from Athena, Hera and
Venus. The image of each goddess is an active hyperlink that leads to another story tree,
therefore to a different way to explore the story. In fact Athena leads to the apple tree of
archetypal myths; Hera to the apple tree of everyday life; and Venus to the apple tree of
art and illustrations myths.
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During this project, students claimed in the context of semi-structured group discussions
that they enjoyed working together and were anxious to reveal all the secrets of their
AppleTree story; nevertheless they felt tired near the end. Despite the practical
difficulties faced during implementation of the project, with minimal resources and time,
the students participating achieved a playful discovery experience, and in fact learnt
about the stories and the connection between the three goddesses. In this case, using the
Milia platform and digital storytelling led to turning material which was already taught
into a departure point for an interactive experience of creativity and learning.
Figure 17. Snapshot from the Miliada story.
4.2 Story #2: Get Into the Museum
One more interactive non-linear story that has been developed by students on the Milia
platform is “Get Into the Museum” (Figure 18). This story, developed by students of the
3rd grade in the 57th Primary School of Athens, is a narration that has come out of their
visit to the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, the exhibits they had the
opportunity to see, and their feelings and observations of this experience.
The sequence of story elements is completely open for the user to navigate, browsing the
corresponding apple tree through apples, leaves or flowers. An important outcome of this
project, beyond end results, lies in the educational process itself, since in order to develop
their online story students effectively employed different digital media, including a
camera, a computer as well as digital games. These were at the same time combined with
conventional handwritten notes and drawings, reinforcing the view that storytelling is an
inherently transmedial
11
activity.
12
11
as this term is proposed in the relevant literature, cf. for instance Leavenworth (2011), Ryan
(2013)
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Figure 18. Snapshot from the “Get Into The Museum” story.
During the visit to the museum students took handwritten notes, drew sketches of the
exhibits and had the opportunity to touch, feel and observe them. In the class, students
collected all their materials and evaluated which photos, drawings, texts and voice
recordings would be posted on the Milia platform, together with some digital games they
selected online (in which case, the corresponding URLs were uploaded on story
elements).
As students were not familiar with the use of the story editing tools of the Milia platform,
educators undertook the role of facilitating students’ work with the platform, leaving to
students the initiative to decide upon the placement of their materials onto the tree
structure of their apple story.
4.3 Story #3: The Magic Apple Tree
One more story that can serve as an example of what can be accomplished within a
formal education setting with the Milia platform is “The Magic Apple Tree”. This third
story is a more traditionally structured fairytale about a magic village of apple trees and a
big dragon. The story was written for the 1st grade pupils of the 2nd Primary School of the
Ano Liossia area, a low socio-economic status suburb region of Athens. The class
consisted of 20 pupils with difficulty in Greek language due to their non-Greek (mostly
Roma) origin.
12
cf. for instance the definition of a narrative in Wikipedia, based on the corresponding lemma of
the Oxford English Dictionary:
“A narrative (or story) is any report of connected events, presented
in a sequence of written or spoken words, and/or in a sequence of (moving) pictures.”
(source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative, last accessed on 05/12/2014)
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During this project, students were triggered by a mystery letter from the people of Apple
Village, asking the students to help them find the secret recipe of an apple pie that they
wanted to cook for the sad dragon of the village. The students played treasure hunt games
to find the recipe ingredients, and subsequently cooked and tasted the apple pie.
Through this educational scenario children having poor oral speech competencies were
effectively encouraged to participate in organised activities of narration, as well as in
informal hands-on activities like preparing an apple pie. The Milia platform was used in
this case as a tool for introducing the activity and gaining the interest and enthusiasm of
students.
Videos, photos and details from implementation of this project are uploaded as a
narration in the Milia platform. It is important to note that, in this case, although
students remained readers (rather than creators) of a story, educators managed to use the
Milia platform as a means for presenting educational material in a much more attractive
and playful way (Figure 19).
Figure 19. Snapshot from the “Magic Apple Tree” story.
The educational projects briefly described above are in line with the conclusion that
digital storytelling has emerged over the last few years as a powerful teaching and
learning tool, with the potential to engage both teachers and students. The Milia platform
aims to capitalise on this potential, supporting the presentation and collaborative creation
of any sort of narrative and stories in digital format, in a way that makes it free and
accessible for every user to “plant” his/her own story.
5. Limitations and directions of future work for the Milia platform
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The Milia platform is a project of the Laboratory of New Technologies in
Communication, Education and the Mass Media of the University of Athens, launched in
March 2010. The first pilot version of Milia was a stand-alone flash application where
writers, in order to create new stories, had to manually embed story elements inside the
application, something that needed programming skills. This prototypical implementation
served to prove the concept of the platform and gain support and interest around it. At
the same time, it necessitated creating a different software application per story, and it
did not facilitate reaching a wider audience that can best be found online. Additional
practical problems had to do with the fact that story element files (videos, sounds, text,
images) had to be locally stored in the writers’ computers and named according to specific
conventions, making it impractical to talk about portability.
The current version of Milia is an online application, based on the Flash and PhP
environments for application development and the Joomla content management system,
which enables writers to create stories within a user-friendly environment. Element files
are stored centrally on the Milia server and metadata are automatically generated,
organised and stored in the Milia Database for future use. This development is the result
of a good initial design of the platform, coupled with a great amount of hard work and
persistence from the members of the Milia project team. Although a lot has been
achieved, there is still a lot that can done in the future. Many new ideas are being
discussed for a future version of the Milia platform, and some of these ideas are presented
below.
For a linear story to be created with the current version of Milia platform, AppleTree
storywriters can number story elements to define the sequence of content, and visitors
need to search the elements one by one to find out the predefined sequence. The same
description field can be used to create a story with a different structure, for example a
nodal story, where an AppleTree element may point to different elements, depending on
a viewer’s choice (Figure 20).
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Figure 20. Using number references to deliver a branching view of a story.
In a future version, the Milia platform could respond dynamically to viewer’s choices. For
example, in a linear story, only the first story element would be visible. When a visitor
previews it that would trigger the appearance of the next element and so on. On top of
that, in a nodal story there could be branching points (Figure 21a) where different paths
could be proposed (Figure 21b) and the visitor could then decide which one to follow: by
clicking the flower element, (Figure 21c) the flower path would be automatically
revealed or by clicking the leaf element, (Figure 21d) the leaf path would be revealed.
The current AppleTree story creation procedure is based on an authentication schema,
where writers create and post stories and visitors preview them. In a future version
visitors could participate more actively in the formation of a story, being allowed
capabilities to move a story element to a different place as well as hide/unhide it.
Additionally, visitors, as well as writers, could be enabled to create new branches, add
their own elements to a preexisting AppleTree story and save the resulting AppleTree
stories locally to their computers. An appropriate stored data encoding of those
personalised stories could allow to load them back to the Milia platform and make them
visible for public view.
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Figure 21. Extension for revealing alternative paths of story elements.
Another useful addition could be the integration into Milia of all the utilities that a writer
may need in order to directly produce the content of story elements, such as for example
a drawing application, a text editor, or a sound recorder. This could be helpful to writers
with limited experience in managing files, such as elderly people or school students, by
making it simpler for them to create new content for a story element (rather than being
limited to upload already existing media files) and save it directly into the Milia platform.
Another improvement could be the use of a soundtrack per AppleTree story. A song or
music track could act as a background companion for an entire story, offering to visitors
an enriched experience. Writers could add a soundtrack to their stories through a
procedure similar to uploading a sound element, whereas visitors could use a sound
control toolbar (Figure 22) to play, pause, stop, increase/decrease volume or mute the
soundtrack.
As the number of posted AppleTree stories grows (as of the time of writing, the Milia
platform hosts more than 70 stories) there is the need for categorisation. Different levels
of categorization can be envisaged, based on areas of interest (such as education,
environment, culture), age range or socio-cultural profile of the audience that a story is
addressed to (such as subcategories for Preschool, Primary School, Secondary School and
Tertiary Education under a category for education). Writers could set the category of a
story from the
“New Appletree Story” screen
(Figure 23) and metadata could be
automatically generated, allowing visitors to filter available AppleTree stories per
categories, using similar drop-down lists.
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Figure 22. Extension for integrating a sound control toolbar.
Figure 23. Extension for setting the category of a new story.
Moreover, another way to filter the increasing number of AppleTree stories would be to
incorporate an advanced search engine into the Milia platform. Visitors would be able to
search for a story using keywords. Searching could be based on current stored Milia
metadata (story description, story elements description and filenames, etc) as well as on
metadata from future extensions (e.g. story categorisation).
One more feature, which would add feedback capabilities to the Milia platform could be
the addition of an open forum per AppleTree story, where visitors would post comments
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or suggest improvements for a specific story. This way, writers would be able to see the
impact of their story to the public and proceed to necessary adjustments.
On top of that, in light of the current developments in online social media and online
social networks, it is clear that the Milia platform lends itself to a number of social
extensions which include:
(a) extensions with facilities for content-centered social actions, namely facilities to
like and comment AppleTree stories, as well as share these stories in social media
such as Facebook, Twitter and many others
(b) extensions with facilities for user-centered social actions, namely facilities to
follow AppleTree story creators as well as subscribe to AppleTree story channels.
These extensions are quite straightforward to propose, as they rely on concepts which
have now been established and operationalized in major social media popular nowadays
while, at the same time, they also fit nicely with the overall functional logic of the Milia
online platform. What is more, the development of such social mechanisms has the
potential to boost the social dimensions of the way in which the Milia platform is used,
thus pushing forward its design ambitions to operate as a platform for social storytelling.
Implementation of these extensions, on the other side, has a number of subtleties which
range from technical issues (integrating the Milia platform with social media APIs) all the
way to operational challenges (for instance, up-scaling the Milia server capacity as
required for managing large numbers of users and workloads), and will thus require
careful technical design decisions and a well-planned development approach.
Still, despite their demands in implementation effort, these and other similar extensions
can be expected to help the Milia platform proceed closer to fulfilling its overarching
objective, that is, to offer an open, online, social, interactive space where writers can
create stories and readers can have the opportunity to extend and enrich alternative
versions of these stories using their own ideas.
Acknowledgements
The Milia platform is developed by an interdisciplinary team of the Laboratory of New
Technologies in Communication, Education and the Mass Media of the Faculty of
Communication and Media Studies of the University of Athens, including Alexandros
Douros, Electra Galani, Nikolas Perdikares, Manolis Spanoudakis, Evagelia Vardalachou
and Ariana Papavasileiou. The platform has been applied in educational settings and
projects by public school teachers including Eni Meliadou, Alexandra Nakou, Rachel
Germeni, Anastassia Katsougkri, Aristidis Tziavas, Sissy Michalopoulou, Eleuftheria
Malisiova, Vassiliki Alefantinou, Aggeliki Chatira, Stavroula Kylintirea and others.
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Vol.8, No 2 (2015): Broadening Digital Storytelling Horizons 130
Dimitris Gouscos, Assistant Professor with the Faculty of Communication and Media
Studies coordinates the Milia development team and Professor Michalis Meimaris,
Director of the Laboratory of New Technologies, is scientifically responsible for the Milia
project.
The authors of this paper express their gratitude to all contributors of the Milia platform
for their sustained effort and interest in this endeavour.
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