The Memorable Story Framework was created to allow people to learn from memorable stories and to encourage the telling of memorable stories. It is an attempt to capture in a simple interface some of the key elements identified by Julian Orr and others in their studies of the uses of stories in communities of practice to encourage learning, to facilitate problem solving, and to create and maintain the community (Orr, 1996).
The framework has several simple parts:
- It has a "tell me a story" button. This is implemented to show the highest rated story that the requester has not yet seen. The framework keeps track (through "cookies") of which stories the requestor has seen already. If you specify a search term, then only those stories containing that term are shown, and only tellers of those stories are shown in the top ten story tellers.
- It has a simple rating system, which allows readers to give a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" to stories they've seen. This is the basis on which stories are ranked. All new stories enter with a zero rating score, and each positive rating increases a story's rating score by 1 and each negative rating decreases its rating score by 1.
- It has a "I have a better story than that!" button. This encourages readers to become tellers of stories, in part "inspired" by the story that they've just seen.
- It has a "hall of fame" listing of the top ten story tellers. This is a ranking of tellers rather than of stories. For each teller, their "score" is the total of the rating scores of all the stories they have told.
These elements contribute to a framework that we hope will generate the kinds of friendly/competitive story telling that Orr characterizes as "war stories" in his study of Xerox copier repair technicians.
Orr, Julian. (1996). Talking about machines: An ethnography of a modern job. Ithaca NY: ILR Press.
Last updated: 18 March 2003
Designed by Jim Levin <jalevin@ucsd.edu>
Developed by Doe-Hyung Kim <dkim12@uiuc.edu>
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