Narrative and its closely related counterpart, storytelling, are most often thought of as modalities for entertainment. Regardless, narrative has long been a part of the repertoire of tools employed by instructors, trainers, and educators to achieve their pedagogical goals. Psychologists have recognized narrative as relevant to the way we store and make sense of episodic experience, often described as the phenomenon of narrative construction of reality. Recent technologies, especially pertaining to artificial intelligence, has demonstrated intelligent learning environments that incorporate narrative in the form of "Edutainment" and "Serious Games" which blend computer game play for more engaging and distributable learning and training. We are interested in the techniques, tools, and strategies for the creation of Narrative Learning Environments as a contribution to Edutainment and Serious Games research.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers from different disciplines to discuss the role of narrative in education and training and to report on techniques, tools, and strategies for the creation of what we call Narrative Learning Environments (NLEs). In our view, a Narrative Learning Environment is a type of Intelligent Learning Environment in which narrative is a key instrument in facilitating teaching and learning. By bringing together a diverse set of researchers from different disciplines we hope to shed light on the possible roles that narrative can play in intelligent learning environments, techniques for using narrative to educate and train, and tools for building Narrative Learning Environments.

Due to the explorative and complex nature of narrative, an intelligent learning environment based on a narrative approach can promote several kinds of activities for learners:

1. Co-construction: participate in the construction of a narrative;
2. Exploration: engage in active exploration of the learning tasks, following a narrative approach and trying to understand and reason about an environment and its elements;
3. Reflection: engage in consequent analysis of what happened within the learning session.

This workshop will be held in conjunction with the 13th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED'07), 9-13 July 2007, Marina Del Rey, California. For more details on the AIED conference in general, visit the conference website: http://www.isi.edu/AIED2007/

This workshop is partially sponsored by:

	The University of Southern California (USC), Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT)
	The Special Interest Group (SIG) on Narrative and Learning Environments of the Kaleidoscope Network of Excellence