ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on narrative guidance and narrative construction as an explanatory framework for the emergence of meaning in educational contexts of using interactive media. It considers the links between narrative and cognition, how the presence or absence of narrative facilitates or impedes learning, and the dynamic processes involved in producing meaning from presented content. These meaning-making processes cycle between the guidance presented by software, peers, and teachers and the activity of constructing new meanings and articulating them to self and others. Much of the chapter is discursive, drawing on the different disciplines of narratology, human-computer interaction, and pedagogy, but it is rooted in many years of observing and using interactive media in classrooms. Altering the teacher's role by reducing their mediation of the presented content imposes higher demands on the quality of the courseware because nearly all communication and interaction then takes place between the student and the computer rather than a three-way interaction that includes the teacher.
