Every museum tells a story

My colleague Cheryl brought Saul Carliner's textbook qualitative comparison of the instructional design processes used in museum exhibit design to my attention. What lessons are here for the instructional design of online learning? Well Carliner devotes another paper to just this question, but what interested me was the use of storytelling as a design technique:

Like books and movies, museum exhibitions have:

• Storylines, that is, the development of a plot
• Key characters, the people whose stories are told by the exhibition
• Juxtaposition, the careful placement of objects and points to provoke thought
• Subliminal messages, points that designers hope to convey without explicitly stating them
• Techniques for holding interest

Carliner suggests as instructional designers "…we employ many of the same storytelling and interpretation techniques used by museum exhibit designers to achieve our goals, although we may call these techniques by other names."

I would suggest that these storytelling elements are applied (if they are applied) in a rather fragmented fashion, what is needed is a more holistic approach to using storytelling techniques in the design of online learning.