I had a student using his own DS in class playing Professor Layton and the Curious Village. He was running to be our class representative on the Green Team and when I thought he was playing the game (which he loved) he was writing his speech to the class on his DS. He was comfortable writing on the tool and took it up in front of the class to reference his notes.
This simple example of a student making a choice made me thinking about larger compositions on a small, handheld device. Is it really appropriate to write on such a compact device? Students are already writing and composing messages on them constantly, why not leverage the writing skills they are developing on this tool and re-purpose it to write longer compositions? Can they write a story small snippets at a time? Is this actually a better fit with how they are composing in their everyday lives?
Can you write entire narratives on a mobile phone? There is an entire genre of writing devoted to the practice in Japan! They are so popular that the dominate best seller lists in Asia. They are called keitai shousetsu, and have short chapters due to the limiting length of messages you can write on a phone. The medium is dictating the form of the writing. The stories are often episodic, short, fast paced adventures. Users can pay to download or subscribe to updates as they are written.
The books have become so popular they are being published, and even being turned into movies. Primarily the original authors and readers where young girls, but with the growth in popularity the readership and authorship is now very diverse. There are even awards for the genre.
Have a look here in Japanese or here with google translate. Caution – the content is all over the place and not always appropriate for young readers. The site has 3.5 billion page views and 6 million subscribers (stats from here). The phenomena is widely popular in Asia, and spreading, but isn’t mainstream in Europe or North America. It takes the idea of mobile handheld learning and expands it into the realm of mobile handheld composition.
Why not set up a posterous site and have students send bits of a story via email or SMS to post as they compose? Use the back and forth nature of how text messages appear to tell a story in a visual pattern?
