Design for Collaborative Learning and Creation of Participatory Media through Visual Narrative Construction

The doctoral thesis deals with design for collaborative learning and creation of participatory media through visual narrative construction. I base my thinking on CSCL (Computer Supported Collaborative Learning), social constructivism, communication studies in relation to audience participation and identity construction, narrative psychology and visual communication. My study attempts to encourage active people’s involvement in questioning and creation of participatory media rather than passive consumption of traditional media. I will design, develop and test some new media tools in order to explore how narrative co-construction and participatory storytelling could be used in formal and non-formal education contexts. I would like to explore if collaborative narrative approach helps to situate learning and if portable and mobile devices could be of some use helping to achieve situatedness of student’s experiences and activities. I will focus on visual expression and investigate how narrative can be employed to overcome complexity in interpretation of visual thinking. I am also interested to research whether affective value of collaborative visual narrative co-construction has positive influence in students’ motivation and active engagement in to learning process. I base my work on experience with design for web based collaborative environments (such as Fle3 learning system) that we have been developing in Learning Environments research group in Media Lab UIAH as a starting point. I intend to design, develop and test tools specifically for participatory media creation and collaborative coconstruction of visual narrative. I am using action research method: conducting several cycles of “interventions” in real communities in order to get user feedback and develop collaborative visual narrative tools further. My main goal is to design tools and methods for collaborative narrative construction that would be reusable in different formal and informal learning contexts.