Beyond Text: Personal, Interactive and Collaborative Sense Making Roy Williams, Regina Karousou, Simone Gumtau. University of Portsmouth

Setting the Scene The current context for the Student Learning Experience Digital Learning Ecology Networked Flexible Shared Accessible Diana Oblinger (Keynote)

Affordances for Learning (AfL) Sample – Foundation degree and Work-Based Students Aim – Narratives about making sense of learning and managing transitions between: Competences Affordances Strategic Affordances Communities Clashes between Affordances or between Communities

Researching Sense-Making Question: What is important to you when learning to become a professional or practitioner in your field? Facilitation/Tools: Biographical Narrative Interview Method (BNIM) (Wengraf et al. 2002) Interactive Interface – Nested Narratives and Multimodality Answer 1. Learning interlinked with identity 2. Reflection – Instrumental Reflection and Ontological Reflection

Create space for: 1. Personal sense making Explore Articulate Within own story space and gestalt 2. Interactive Sense Making Represent Express Reflect and Reassemble Within interactive interface/Nested Narratives 3. Collaborative Sense Making Share with group/s Tacit Audio conversation Intangible Graphics Kinaesthetic (Synaesthetic and Beyond Text) Ontological Reflection

Findings 1. Learning involves managing and negotiating between existing, new and clashing affordances e.g. ‘reading’; 2. Learners need to be aware that not all affordances are transferable; 3. Affordances and transitions are inherently ontological as they involve shifts in identity; 4. Transitions involve changes that can be static, positive or regressive e.g. ‘betwixt space’; 5. Metaphors enable students to articulate the tacit and the intangible; 6. Metaphors illustrate the embeddedness and synaesthesia of language and learning

Conclusions and Implications 1.Building upon existing and innovative research (e.g. LEX and HEA e-Learning Research Observatory); 2.Institutions and Curriculum Designers need to allow flexibility for students who are already aware but need to be able to move between various and conflicting formal and informal communities/discourses. 3.Students and HEIs need to move beyond instrumental reflections to also include ontological reflection and learning. Failure to do so, may inhibit the transition from ‘confident students’ to ‘professional students’

Further Research 1.Expanding the ‘Collaborative Sense Making’ element of the project 2.Applying it to new and diverse contexts inside and outside HE 3.Expanding the affordances for tacit and intuitive sense making e.g. adding functionality to the current interface and incorporating kinaesthetic touch-tables

Project’s resources 1. HEA website – end of project report 2. Project’s wiki – 3. Methodology paper –Brookes e-Journal on Learning and Teaching 2 (4), 2009.