Digital personal stories: bringing together generations and enriching communities

This chapter draws on a community project 'Remember' which explored the potential of digital personal stories to support cross-setting and intergenerational dialogue. Over six months, children in two Year 4 classrooms interviewed local people about their WWII experiences and documented these in writing, pictures and audio, using an iPad app called ‘Our Story’ and additional web-based resources from a local archive. Story-sharing and collection of personal digital materials were facilitated by AirWatch software which enabled safe story-sharing across formal and informal learning contexts.  Digital personalised stories were later shared at a local event and online with the wider community.  The chapter considers how intergenerational collaborative community projects might enrich children’s engagements with the past, how new technologies can mediate sharing of authentic community narratives and facilitate meaningful intergenerational and cross-setting interactions.

Like McKee & Heydon (2015), we found that iPads facilitated the story-creation and story-sharing process. Our Story was useful in capturing the stories shared by the elderly and together with the AirWatch technology, the app enabled children and teachers to securely store personally sensitive data and share them with selected users in the community. As such, technologies enabled cross-contextual story-sharing and offered a unique opportunity to develop intergenerational dialogue not only immediately in this project but also for future generations.