The Future of Education

Among the four skills in second language teaching, writing has a rather difficult position: Teachers often consider it to be too time-consuming to extensively train writing in class and outsource it to homework. In consequence, students think of these tasks as tedious and dull activities. Besides, writing tasks are often limited to the so-called “functional writing” as suggested by many textbooks: letters, notes and argumentative text types.

Unfortunately, none of these text types give room for the creative energy of L2 learners, often leaving their potential untapped.

Creative writing is therefore a welcome alternative to the never changing writing assignments. This paper presents the open-source tool Twine and its usage in the collaborative writing process. Twine brings the forgotten genre of Choose-your-own-Adventure-books back to life and allows users without any programming experience to write interactive fiction in the form of web pages. In order to use Twine in a group and make sure the story evolves and comes to an end in time, some logistic precautions have to be taken.

This paper focuses both on the technical aspects of using Twine (creating a story, exporting it as .html-file and hosting the file online) as well as the didactic approach on collaborative storytelling.