CMIS Evaluation Fiction Focus

Have you caught up with Inanimate Alice yet? It is digital storytelling at its most delicious. The fourth of ten episodes has recently come online.

Beginning with Alice as an eight year old living in remote regions of China with her parents, the story will develop in interactive complexity as Alice matures into her twenties. She has so far also been to Russia and Italy and in the fourth episode she is fourteen and living in an ordinary town in England. Why?

The related pedagogy project is attracting educators from around the world.

Each episode takes about half an hour to view. Treat yourself and your students soon.

Inanimate Alice has been created by Chris Joseph, digital writer in residence at The Institute of Creative Technologies at De Montford University, Leicester in the UK.

The sad news has come through that the Endicott Studio Journal of the Mythic Arts is to close. We last referred to this site in relation to Neil Gaiman’s poetry following the CBCA conference at the beginning of May.

The farewell issue will be published in July.

Have you checked out Penguin’s relatively new online community for teenage readers, Between the Lines? We alerted Fiction Focus subscribers to the site in the last issue of 2007, but in the end of year busy-ness it’s easy to overlook such things.

Launched last September, the site is targeting readers aged between 14 and 18, and there’s plenty for them to get their teeth into. Interaction is encouraged through blogs, author chats, book discussions and competitions.

Book of the Month for April is Sarah Dessen’s Just Listen, and being discussed on the blog is Peeps, by Scott Westerfeld who will be joining the discussion at the end of the month.

Australian author James Moloney has a new title coming out soon. We will be reviewing Kill the Possum in Fiction Focus of course, but he will be chatting online about the book on 24 April. Schools need to register in order to participate.

It’s early days for this site but it is rich with possibilities to get your students engaged in reading, as is the wonderful, and more established, Inside a Dog, from Melbourne’s Centre for Youth Literature. Both of these sites are on the Fiction Focus blog roll. It’s worth taking some time to explore them.

Judi, our regular Fiction Focus blogger has not been able to post recently. (Hurry up and get better Judi - we all miss you)

As guest blogger this week I’m going to share a website that was very popular with students at the school where I last taught.

Literature Map - the tourist map of literature

This simple to use website allows users to search for a favourite author and then suggests other writers who may appeal to the reader. The closer two writers are, the more likely someone will like both of them.

The CMIS website also has lots of useful information for teachers and students looking for something new to read. Check out the Focus on Fiction pages and the In the Classroom section of the website for links to:

• Author Studies
• Genre/Theme Studies
• Specific Titles & Series
• Teaching & Learning Strategies
• General Teacher Resources

The CMIS Resource Bank has a searchable database of over 5,000 fiction resources!