Sharing Scientific Knowledge Through Telling Stories and Digital Storytelling

Today's society is marked with excessive loads information, resulting in a growing problem of transforming it into useful knowledge. Therefore, we pay attention to tools to share useful knowledge with long-term effect. The strength of a story is known in trade and also education, where it is commonly used for sharing simpler and more general knowledge. Two years ago, we tested the effectiveness of knowledge transfer through one of the oldest methods - storytelling. We compared the richness and durability of the transmission of scientific knowledge through traditional lectures with the help of a slide presentation and storytelling. We tested the knowledge transfer in two groups of students. We divided the knowledge by type into know-how, know-who, know-why, know when and know-what. It turned out after follow-up testing that the students were more successful in the group to whom the knowledge was presented through storytelling than the classical method group. Even greater differences in favour of storytelling emerged in testing after several weeks. We worked with digital stories elaborated on a selected Knowledge Management topic, this constituted a tool to support knowledge sharing (the "river" diagram). We tested three groups of students to whom the same knowledge was presented (the river diagram). In the first group was given a classic Power Point presentation, the second story received oral story and the third group was presented the same story as a digital storytelling project. All three groups were tested using identical questions, in the phase of a pre-test, a test and a post-test. No differences in the test results between the classic story and the digital story were observed. When comparing stories (classic and digital) wit a traditional slide presentation, the results of knowledge transfer were significantly better in favour of story. This pilot study highlights the effectiveness of storytelling in the process of knowledge sharing and the possibilities of its application in education at universities that form one of the pillars of the knowledge society.