Told through text, sound, images, music, and games, Inanimate Alice is a digital novel about Alice and her imaginary digital friend Brad. Now Alice has launched a group on Promethean Planet–”the world’s largest interactive whiteboard community”–in which educators can learn how to effectively use a digital story to explore plot, narrative structure, setting, and character development, and to support literacy via interactive text.

Writing for KQED’s MindShift, educator Laura Fleming and education strategist John Connell discuss transmedia–”creating and consuming stories simultaneously through text, images, the spoken word, music, video, animation”–perhaps including computer games that allow readers to solve puzzles or choose alternate story paths, or employing social media that enable readers to interact with the story. Fleming and Connell point to Inanimate Alice as an engaging example.

Writing for Edutopia, educator and transmedia champion Laura Fleming defines transmedia–explaining that critical parts of the story must be told across multiple story spaces, and that the story must require reader participation. She also discusses the engaging transmedia phenomenon Inanimate Alice and presents some free resources for educators.

In this blog post, Henry Jenkins revisits the key principles of transmedia, defining it as a different way of organizing the dispersal of media content across media platforms, and discussing how educators might produce transmedia education.

These resources housed on the National Writing Project (U.S.) Digital Is website is curated by library media specialist Laura Fleming. The collection represents one educator’s vision of what transmedia is–and what it can be–for teachers and students learning to read and write in a digital age

Education Week describes how J.K. Rowling’s announcement of Pottermore points us toward a new context for literacy, a context where the book and therefore our habits of reading are evolving through the affordance of digital tools and digital texts. In the linked video, Rowling herself speaks to these changes:

KQED MindShift discusses the creative opportunities available via e-books–interactivity and open-ended stories that authors, publishers, and application developers are just beginning to explore.