During the month of June, I and a few other teachers (@kalinagoenglish, @Marisa_C, @tamaslorincz, @Blythe_Musteric) started a chain story (using the hashtag #cs1).  It went well for a few weeks, but sadly it began to die off.  It was an experiment to see how a chain story could actually work on Twitter.  I learned a few things from the experience:

1. Twitter doesn't let you search for a hashtag that is older than a few weeks. - Twitter will only show the last couple of weeks of a particular hashtag.  This means that if you want to save a particular tweet you must make it your favorite or it will get lost in the Twitterverse.  This can make tracking a chain story a little difficult.
2. It's hard to keep track of the characters. - After the story progressed for a bit, I had to scroll back down and check who was who.  This was made difficult by the disappearing tweets.
3. It was difficult to pass information to the other contributers without interrupting the story. - What I mean is, if you used the same hashtag as the story hashtag it got all mixed up.

So, in order to fix 1), I started making all the #cs1 tweets my favorites in order to track the story.  This worked really well.  Furthermore, other people can view my favorites and catch up with the story.  One problem though, I can't favorite anything else and I can only do one chain story at a time.  Not the best solution, but it'll work for now.

Now, how about 2)?  You can turn your tweets into book at http://tweetbook.in I used this to make a pdf of the current story.  This will hopefully make it easier to track.  Also, I'll post the summaries of each character below.

And finally, let's talk about 3).  We can use the hashtag #cs1-off to make comments, or ask questions about the current story.

Here are the character summaries of #cs1:

Pono or "hope" - The young female main character of the story.  She is lost in the fog.

Pali - The young boy that Pono later meets.  His parents were killed by Nefuru.

Lulu - Pali's little 3 year old sister.

Nefuru - The evil wizard trying to unlock the secrets of the Nogl.  His symbol is a crossbow and fire.

Chief Nauguru - Chief of Pono's village.

Current Situation:

Pono, Pali, and Lulu have escaped from Nefuru and are now inside the village.  The village is protected by a spell, but something seems strange.  Nobody is there.  There is a loud rumbling noise and then....

Can you finish the story?  Download the pdf attached to this post and continue the tale with the #cs1 hashtag, if you dare! And be sure to follow me @nealchambers to read the updates.

Also, is anyone interested in starting up another chain story?  I recently attended a conference on extensive reading (ER) and thought it might be interesting to try to write a graded chain story.  We could limit it to basic grammar and a set number of headwords.  I think it would be extremely useful because we could get some language learners to join the story too.  What do you think?  Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Attachments:

Chainstory_vol1.pdf

[The first volume of the chain story, sorry about the ugly mugshot at the beginning.]

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