Interaction Geography & the Learning Sciences

The three papers in this dissertation contribute to research that seeks to characterize the complex and multi-dimensional relation between the physical environment and human learning. The first paper outlines a new approach to describe, represent, and interpret people’s interaction as they move within and across physical environments. I call this approach interaction geography. It encompasses Mondrian Transcription, a method to map people’s movement and conversation over space and time, and the Interaction Geography Slicer (IGS), a dynamic visualization tool that supports new forms of interaction and multi-modal analysis. The second paper extends this work to provide a conceptual framework to expand interaction geography in studies of learning. I show how interaction geography offers resources to integrate four historically separate research perspectives in order to study how people’s interaction, movement, and responses to, and actions on, the physical environment lead people to learn. The third paper adapts and uses the IGS to visualize and discuss data about New York City’s Stop-And-Frisk Program. I show how the IGS provides new ways to view, interact with, and query large-scale data sets of stop-and-frisk and crime data over space and through time to support analyses of and public discussion about a controversial social and political issue

Visualizing Qualitative Data: Creative Approaches for Analyzing and Demonstrating Lively Data from Diverse Learning Settings

This structured poster session aims to showcase novel approaches of qualitativelyanalyzing and communicating lively data—data that is complex, nuanced, multimodal, and multi-voiced. Such data is rich but also messy, often defying the traditional text-based forms of description and presentation. Therefore, the session pairs creative techniques and methods to analyze, triangulate, and/or visualize qualitative findings across multiple data sources (e.g., video, digital and physical spaces, participant artifacts, and patterns of movement) from diverse learning contexts (e.g., museums, libraries, outdoor spaces, and classrooms)—beyond showing transcriptions. The visual format of the session supports our goal of sharing and communicating rich data stories for further discussion with diverse audiences

Interactive Transcription Techniques for Interaction Analysis

Interaction analysis is a valuable method and approach to study knowledge in use in the learning sciences and CSCL communities. Central to interaction analysis is the creation of transcripts to selectively encode and represent audio and video data. However, current transcription techniques used in interaction analysis, including multimodal transcription techniques, have yet to explore the strengths and weaknesses of interactive visualization to selectively encode and represent people’s interaction in context. Drawing from our recent efforts to amplify, not automate, transcription in qualitative research, this paper interactively visualizes one video dataset in five different ways using contemporary interactive visualization techniques. Findings and discussion characterize these visualizations as interactive transcripts that demonstrate techniques valuable to interaction analysis, but also highlight the need to expand how people, things, and context are represented through visualization mediums such as visualization programming languages to align with work more meaningfully in the learning sciences and CSCL communities

Classroom Interaction Geography: A Case Study

The study of classroom discourse is central to understanding and supporting effective teaching practice. Recently, researchers have begun to explore the spatial dimension of classroom discourse. However, this work emphasizes the lack of methods, particularly visual methods, to fully explore the spatial dimension of classroom discourse. This paper uses an approach to studying collaborative interaction we have developed called interaction geography to revisit a classic case known as “Sean Numbers” from the work of renown teacher educator Deborah Ball. Our analysis highlights the value of interaction geography to visually and dynamically explore the spatial and temporal dimensions of classroom discourse. We also make a data visualization of this work available to support further discussion and work to describe classroom interaction geograph

Visualizing Qualitative Data: Creative Approaches for Analyzing and Demonstrating Lively Data from Diverse Learning Settings

This structured poster session aims to showcase novel approaches of qualitatively analyzing and communicating lively data—data that is complex, nuanced, multimodal, and multi-voiced. Such data is rich but also messy, often defying the traditional text-based forms of description and presentation. Therefore, the session pairs creative techniques and methods to analyze, triangulate, and/or visualize qualitative findings across multiple data sources (e.g., video, digital and physical spaces, participant artifacts, and patterns of movement) from diverse learning contexts (e.g., museums, libraries, outdoor spaces, and classrooms)—beyond showing transcriptions. The visual format of the session supports our goal of sharing and communicating rich data stories for further discussion with diverse audiences

Here and then: Learning by making places with digital spatial story lines

In this article, we introduce and analyze learning experiences made possible by a teaching framework that we have developed and call digital spatial story lines (DSSLs). DSSLs offer a novel approach to learning on the move by engaging learners with related conceptual practices of archival curation, digital mapping, and the production of public history. Learners collaborate to make and follow map-based story lines that bridge archival media they curate in public libraries and museums onto city neighborhoods these media describe. Story lines can be followed as tours to explore under- or untold stories about a city’s public history at walking scale. To illustrate and study learning within the DSSL framework, we describe and analyze one design iteration from a larger, multi-year research project with local museum, library, and high school partners. Our analysis shows how making and following story lines provided opportunities for pre-service social studies teachers to engage with and learn about the public history of racial segregation, Civil Rights Movement activism, and American Roots Music in Nashville, Tennessee (aka the “Music City”). Our analysis focuses on using archival material to create and share public history as a mobile experience of being both “here-and-then”—a form of palimpsest in which learning on the move layers together historic places and the voices of different historical actors. We end with a discussion of who speaks for the public history of city neighborhoods and the prospects and limitations for teaching and learning with the DSSL framework

Enhancing Free-text Interactions in a Communication Skills Learning Environment

Learning environments frequently use gamification to enhance user interactions.Virtual characters with whom players engage in simulated conversations often employ prescripted dialogues; however, free user inputs enable deeper immersion and higher-order cognition. In our learning environment, experts developed a scripted scenario as a sequence of potential actions, and we explore possibilities for enhancing interactions by enabling users to type free inputs that are matched to the pre-scripted statements using Natural Language Processing techniques. In this paper, we introduce a clustering mechanism that provides recommendations for fine-tuning the pre-scripted answers in order to better match user inputs