Storytelling at a Distance
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Clearly, there is a pedagogically significant cause-and-effect relationship between narrative and cognition. Consider, for example, this brief story that I have used in an e-learning course to open interface-design discussions:

Not long ago, flying into an unfamiliar airport on a business trip, I rented a car. It was a model I'd never driven before, but I usually don't have any trouble adjusting to different cars. Driving out of the rental-car company's parking lot, the gate attendant wanted a copy of my rental contract, and I had to roll down the window to hand over the document. But I couldn't find the crank or the switch anyplace on the inside of the door, or even on the dashboard. Finally, in desperation, I opened the door. The attendant told me that the automatic window controls were on the gear panel between the seats. Since I normally drive a stick shift, this was not where I expected to find any controls, although, once I did, I was very impressed by my ability to open all four windows in the car, not just mine.

    Since the story is in the first-person, there is an agent with whom the learner can identify. This single move to the first person closes a substantial distance between the learner and the material. There is also some tension: There's an unfamiliar airport, a strange car, and a destination where work will take place. People have been in that situation, so they know the accompanying feelings of anxiety, fatigue, and frustration. Further, there is the agent's inability to solve a simple problem, which gives rise to self-deprecating humor. Then, there are resolution and closure. The elements that comprise a story embody the concept in a more memorable way than the explicit statement of the abstract concept: users carry their expectations and prior knowledge with them as they move among platforms, in this case, among different automobiles. Those expectations must be taken into account, otherwise consumers are likely to resist newly introduced products or will require user training, which is impractical for the everyday technologies embedded in consumer items. In the case of cars, training or reading the owner's documentation is assumed to be unnecessary for experienced drivers who purchase, borrow, or rent a car, especially for routine tasks such as opening a window.
    Equally important is stories' plasticity-the ease with which they are personalized and molded by presenters' personalities. This personalization tends to help close the gap between teachers and students. The personalization possible with stories helps equalize and demystify the teacher/learner relationship by eliciting students' understanding, empathy, and their capacity to relate to teachers more casually and meaningfully. For instance, when training new e-learning instructors or facilitators, I sometimes tell them this story:

When teaching in a classroom, it is generally easy to make a student aware that you are uncomfortable with their behavior by looking at them, moving close to them, or even taking them aside during a break. In one of the first distance-learning classes I taught, most sessions used synchronous technologies, and one of the weekly sessions relied on room-based videoconferencing. In the first videoconferencing session for this class, one of the students (I'll call him Bill) at a particular site sat at the camera controls. Every time someone at his site spoke, Bill spent the entire time they were talking zooming in on them, adjusting to the left, the right, up and down, until he had the person's face shown exactly as he wanted it. This was distracting; in fact, the continual camera adjustments made it impossible to focus on what the speaker said. I agonized over how to get Bill to stop. Since I was at a different site and had no phone or computer access to him, I had no private way to ask Bill to stop, and I didn't want to publicly humiliate him by making the request in front of the class. Finally, the class ended with no resolution.

However, after a little thought, I called up one of the other students at Bill's location and asked him to sit at the controls during our next videoconference. He hesitated, saying that Bill enjoyed the camera work; but he also let me know that everyone in the room was annoyed with Bill's incessant adjustments, although no one felt comfortable asking him to stop. Rather, class members thought the responsibility fell to me. I responded by bypassing the problem: I simply set a new official class policy that different students would have turns attending to the camera controls.

My videoconferencing training dealt only with functionality-I knew how to deal with technology failures and dropped lines-but I did not know how to deal with disruptive students. This situation made me realize the dilemmas that could occur in teaching at a distance and the need for creative solutions to unanticipated situations. I try to convey this with humor and drama, but also express that, despite having only a workaround solution, I survived my first distance-teaching crisis.

Stories' plasticity helps learners experience concepts, and understanding and empathy can encourage students to create and share their own stories, an effective way of establishing a dialogue (Laurillard, 1993). The mere use of storytelling in a learning context sends the message that stories are acceptable ways for learners to communicate with instructors and peers. The combination of creative, narrative, and analytical modes of thinking significantly enhances students' learning experiences and boosts inter-student interactions that nurture peer-to-peer learning.

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