Co-designing Electronic Books: Boundary Objects for Social Creativity

The European ‘MC-squared’ project has a number of ‘Communities of Interest’ (CoI) (Fischer, 2001) in European countries that work on digital, interactive, creative, mathematics textbooks, called cBooks. A community of interest consists of several stakeholders from various ‘Communities of Practice’ (Wenger, 1998). In this paper we outline the creation of an English CoI describing the development of a cBook on numbers and equivalence. We use a design-based research methodology approach for teachers, designers, researchers, teacher-educators jointly working on cBooks as ‘boundary objects’ (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011) to facilitate thinking about creative mathematical thinking and social creativity. We illustrate our design-based approach through the example artefacts created during the different stages of development of the cBooks. The details of our approach provide a blueprint for the formation of CoI’s by working on digital, interactive, creative, mathematics textbooks.