ABSTRACT
How do the examples in this chapter help us understand the practice of storytelling in the mobile media age? The Visual Storytelling Club in Toronto, a group of college students with intellectual disabilities, uses iPads as devices for nonlinear storytelling. Guided by various prompts and scenarios, the students draw responses from their own lives, drawing their stories as a means to work around limited literacy skills and difficulties in expressing themselves verbally (either as a result of verbal/speech/language impairments, shyness, or social anxiety in new settings or situations). Interestingly, the creation of visual stories was remarkably different when using an iPad versus other media such as marker and paper or even a desktop computer. The perceived affordances of the iPad, or the functions and opportunities it seems to offer, greatly impact the students’ interactions with this medium as they create their visual stories. A part of the artist is constituted in the telling, and the medium is entangled in the tale. Thus, we conjecture that these types of devices begin to blur the boundaries between the tool and the stories told.
