Transmedia LearningWorlds: Writing the Book

At the end of 2010, I co-authored, with John Connell, a piece for the GETideas blog on transmedia in education – Considering Transmedia: Literature ‘Born Digital’. Over the next few months, that one piece garnered more readers than every other post on the site combined. As a consequence of the interest raised by the blog post, GETideas set up a virtual round-table on the subject – entitled Transmedia Storytelling & New Media Literacies. The resulting discussion was rich and opened up a number of issues that are key to an understanding of the place of transmedia in learning, including, amongst many others, the eternal power of storytelling, the nature of knowledge and literacy in a post-literate society, the shifting locus of control in education from teacher to learner, the need now to consider a spectrum of literacies for our young people, and the merging of storytelling with the current crop of digital and networking technologies.

My own involvement with Inanimate Alice has also given me a wealth of insights into the depth of thinking and of imagination that goes into the conception and realization of a powerful transmedia text.

So, between John and myself, we came to the conclusion that there is a real and urgent need for a book that will open up the world of transmedia to teachers and learners. As a result, we have decided to co-author a book that takes learning as its starting point and sets out to describe the potential of transmedia for educators across the world. The book is provisionally titled:

–Transmedia LearningWorlds–

The aim will be to take the familiar transmedia concept of StoryWorlds and translate it for an educational setting, hence LearningWorlds. Where a StoryWorld might be defined as an immersive experience that allows for myriad entry points into a narrative, a LearningWorld, in our minds, will be an immersive learning landscape that enables multivarious entry and exit points for learning and teaching.

Our plan is to structure the book around what we see as the full range of critical questions to be considered by any teacher hoping to bring the power of transmedia into his or her teaching. Equally, we want the book to have value both for learners as they think about their own learning in transmedia LearningWorlds and for the creators and designers of transmedia implementations.  We want to start with the educational philosophy and the pedagogy that can underpin transmedia in learning, a definition of transmedia in the educational context, the power of narrative, the transmedia classroom, transmedia beyond the classroom, the new literacies, the conception, creation and dissemination of transmedia, the major affordances offered to education by transmedia, the potential of transmedia in generating social change, and of course some examples of effective transmedia currently available in education across the world.

We intend to make special mention of Inanimate Alice, the prime mover in this burgeoning field, and to use its example as a springboard for thinking about the multiple directions that transmedia in education might take into the future.

We have set up a Twitter account at @transmedialearn, which we have already begun to populate – please feel free to follow us there.

We would also love to be able to gather lots of exciting examples of teachers and learners making interesting use of transmedia in their learning and teaching from all over the world – anyone with a story to tell or an idea to share can get in touch with us via the Twitter account or simply email us at:

transmedialearning@gmail.com