Abstract:

The advent of digital technology, and especially the World Wide Web, has led to the emergence of new forms of creation, production, distribution and reception of audiovisual productions. The effects of this have manifested clearly in the ways audiovisual stories are constructed and consumed. In today's communication ecosystem we have a new genre, a new format that is still developing and adapting to the environment: the "interactive documentary". In recent years there has been much experimentation with this new audiovisual genre, whose creative possibilities are almost boundless. Interactive documentaries create a new logic for the representation of reality. The emphasis of this new logic lies on the relationship between the text and the user, when navigating and interacting, rather than how the author constructs a specific discourse on reality for traditional viewers.

The Internet and Web 2.0 offer immense opportunities to enhance some of the classic principles of education and spreading knowledge in general. The genres and forms of interactive nonfiction, applied in the context of information transfer, are now being used as pedagogic tools and teaching materials that teachers can apply in different contexts: as a visual support to illustrate or complement the lectures, integrated within the virtual campus of the educational institution, as a possible digital application that can replace tests and purely hypertext exercises, as a teaching tool to train the teachers themselves as well as companies, etc.

In this paper we analyse the different possibilities offered by interactive nonfiction forms, and specifically interactive documentary, for education. After introducing and defining the interactive documentary, we focus on specific constructivist and cognitive learning theories and trends in digital media education developed in recent years. This state-of-the-art led us to develop our main hypothesis: while the linear documentary only allows the viewer to interpret the images seen on a personal level, the interactive version allows more processes and/or behaviours, such as viewing (observer), playing (player), learning (student) and sharing (prosumer). This multiple exchange makes the interactive form very appropriate and beneficial not only for audiovisual and interactive purposes, but also for content dissemination and knowledge transfer.

To test our hypothesis we apply the four processes/behaviours of our hypothesis as indicators to analyse a representative sample of case studies from different countries: firstly, some of the educational initiatives that have been developed at the National Film Board of Canada in the project Inside Out My Window ‒ Global Education Lab (Highrise, National Film Board of Canada, 2011); secondly, an outstanding example of docugame called Fort McMoney (David Dufresne, 2013); and lastly the design and implementation of the project InterDOC (Arnau Gifreu, Valentina Moreno, Angela Gomez and Mariona Vivar, 2013), an educational platform and environment in the latin area. In the conclusion we discuss some of the possibilities of expansion interactive documentary provides when it is applied for educational purposes. We conclude that interactive documentary could be a suitable tool for the educational field because it offers new ways to approach, understand, play and learn from reality, and therefore, by extension, knowledge and content dissemination.

Keywords:

Educational multimedia, interactive documentary, interactive nonfiction, constructivist theories.