Collaborative Narrative: The Wiki novel

My knowledge and encounters with digital narratives are painfully limited. But last night I came across a project involving the ioct guys at dmu along with Penguin publishers. This is the wikinovel A Million Penguins. For me, this was fascinating to see the polymorphous, polyphonic nature of the collaborative writing. Even more so was the comment on the blog that users should not try to read it like a conventional narrative, and instead just dip in for 10 minutes or so at a time.

I've got to spend more time looking at the comments and discussions people are having about this, because my experience was that students really did not like this kind of reading experience. The power of print conventions and the actually experience of reading online made hypertextual reading really frustrating for the students I was working with. An initial summary of some of this project is in my book. I've just been showing some of my current students a million penguins, so it will be interesting to see what they make of it too.