Working with the Digital Pedagogies Project, Carleton’s Hyperlab is seeking early adopters who are interested in exploring Locative XR. Their team has developed workshops on immersive and interactive site-specific stories, games, and exhibits for mobile devices, allowing instructors to easily integrate spatial and environmental storytelling into their courses.
The workshops focus on the StoryTrek platform, which blends digital media with real-world locations to create compelling sites of experiential learning,” according to Brian Greenspan, Carleton’s 2024 Chair in Teaching Innovation. “We’ve shown large groups of students how to design site-specific mobile experiences, then test them out in the real world, all in the space of a single workshop.”
The Immersive Storytelling workshop was a particularly good fit for Prof. Micheline White’s third-year “Book in the Digital Age” class. “We dovetailed from a discussion about narrative and digital media into actually designing our own mobile stories and taking them outdoors, then returned to class for more critical reflection on the changing nature of storytelling, embodiment, and sense of place. It was a really creative and provocative exercise, and the students had a lot of fun.”
While Prof. White’s class was a particularly apt opportunity for thinking through the meaning of narrative in the digital world, Greenspan notes that the workshop’s not just for humanities courses. “Storytelling is central to so many disciplines. Students in all kinds of programs find it really engaging to use our campus to tell stories about history, culture, geography, built environments, or science and nature, then immediately experience their own creations. Some have even used StoryTrek as a study aid, since placing abstract information in real-world locations is a great way to remember it. The platform is especially useful for storytelling projects aimed at wider community engagement.”
Instructors who are interested in scheduling a workshop can contact Prof. Greenspan directly at brian.greenspan@carleton.ca.