In any case, however good the tools are, we still need to get at the question, What does it mean to tell a story? I think there are two answers: First there is a simple accounting or this-is-the-way-I-see-things. That’s what Morse Code is talking about. It’s important and it’s certainly more than the sort of storytelling you get by reading through the aggreagation of someone’s Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn postings. Heekya could be a tool for that, but it won’t guarantee that it’s more than that.

Secondly, there’s more to storytelling. The sorts of things that appear on social media sites are plot and chartacter details: here are my photos from my vacation in France, here are my favourite books, here’s what I think about the election results and so on. These tell the world about me, but they do not tell the world my story. And, as any critical reader knows, plot driven stories are fun to read, but not really very interesting. In a good story, the main character–that’s you or me–has something to overcome, a lesson to learn. This is not to suggest we are passive observers, mind you. When a day passes it is no longer there. What remains of it? Nothing more than a story. Today, we live, but by tomorrow today will be a story. The whole world, all human life, is one long story. But, I might now ask, why does anyone tell a story? Madeline L’Engle says it has “something to do with faith, faith that the universe has meaning, that our little lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.” Or, as Walt Whitman wrote in Oh Me! Oh Life! “The powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.” This final line of his poem is framed as an answer to a question, what good we amid “the endless trains of the faithless—of cities fill’d with the foolish…”? Whitman’s choice to use the future tense fills the poem with tremendous hope; it conveys a sense of prediction and promise. But the hope is contingent on us; we are inescapably the authors of our own verses and we must admit that we may either contribute something good or something mediocre, or worse.

So, if a new technology can help me build a sense of story, as I’ve just described it, as well as the skill of storytelling, then it’s worth something. But it will need to have more leverage than good old pen and paper. I’m genuinely curious to see what Heekya can do.

Another blogger, Morse’s Code , wrote a great post about Heekya and it’s potential as an educational tool. Read the post here:

Heekya which is an digital storytelling tool that allows people to create stories that happen in real life. You can use it as a digital scrapbook or you can add to stories that are happening in the world. It is like the wikipedia for story-telling where others can come and create their version of the feature story, whether it is about a world event or a personal event (wedding). I can see a great potential for educational uses of this tool. Students can express their viewpoint about a specific event in history, current event, or storyline in a book or a topic. It also helps students to see the viewpoints on others on the same event or topic. This tools looks very promising and I am interested in using it to see what other possibilities it has for personal and educational use.