Chapter 5 Imagining, designing and exhibiting architecture in the digital landscape

Designs for Experimentation and Inquiry examines how digital media is reconfiguring the established worlds of research, education, and professional practice. It reflects on the theoretical, methodological, and ethical issues shaping contemporary engagements with digital learning and offers insights for both analysing and intervening in digital learning practices. This insightful volume fills a gap in the current literature by bringing together experiences from Sociocultural Studies of Learning, Science and Technology Studies, and Design Studies. Each chapter is an innovative case study, examining a different aspect of digital media’s role in research, education and professional practice

Chapter 5 Imagining, designing and exhibiting architecture in the digital landscape

Designs for Experimentation and Inquiry examines how digital media is reconfiguring the established worlds of research, education, and professional practice. It reflects on the theoretical, methodological, and ethical issues shaping contemporary engagements with digital learning and offers insights for both analysing and intervening in digital learning practices. This insightful volume fills a gap in the current literature by bringing together experiences from Sociocultural Studies of Learning, Science and Technology Studies, and Design Studies. Each chapter is an innovative case study, examining a different aspect of digital media’s role in research, education and professional practice

Understanding Curved Spacetime: The Role of the Rubber Sheet Analogy in Learning General Relativity

According to general relativity (GR), we live in a four-dimensional curved universe. Since the human mind cannot visualize those four dimensions, a popular analogy compares the universe to a two-dimensional rubber sheet distorted by massive objects. This analogy is often used when teaching GR to upper secondary and undergraduate physics students. However, physicists and physics educators criticize the analogy for being inaccurate and for introducing conceptual conflicts. Addressing these criticisms, we analyze the rubber sheet analogy through systematic metaphor analysis of textbooks and research literature, and present an empirical analysis of upper secondary school students’ use and understanding of the analogy. Taking a theoretical perspective of embodied cognition allows us to account for the relationship between the experiential and sensory aspects of the metaphor in relation to the abstract nature of spacetime. We employ methods of metaphor and thematic analysis to study written accounts of small groups of 97 students (18–19 years old) who worked with a collaborative online learning environment as part of their regular physics lessons in five classes in Norway. Students generated conceptual metaphors found in the literature as well as novel ones that led to different conceptions of gravity than those held by experts in the field. Even though most students showed awareness of some limitations of the analogy, we observed a conflict between students’ embodied understanding of gravity and the abstract description of GR. This conflict might add to the common perception of GR being counterintuitive. In making explicit strengths and weaknesses of the rubber sheet analogy and learners’ conceptual difficulties, our results offer guidance for teaching GR. More generally, these findings contribute to the epistemological implications of employing specific scientific metaphors in classrooms

Metaimagining and embodied conceptions of spacetime

Though we live in a 4-dimensional universe, our minds and bodies are not particularly good at perceiving and depicting 4 dimensions. This study contributes to our understanding of collaboration with abstract concepts by examining particular activities where bodily and experiential understandings may conflict with the conceptual domain. Specifically, upper secondary physics classrooms studying Einstein’s general theory of relativity are taken as a setting to identify the representational practices and conceptual challenges that arise when learners attempt to make meaning with, and express conflicting notions of, space and time. To unpack these challenges, we draw on the concept of imagination and on theoretical perspectives that treat imagining as a social activity. We also present the concept of metaimagining to characterize layered processes in which learners attend to and manage shifts between their own imaginative activities. This concept is illustrated through a detailed analysis of an extended conversation between 2 upper secondary physics students working with general relativity and spacetime. The students perform a diverse set of imaginative activities that are strongly tied to communicative, cognitive, and bodily action. We also show how the unique domain of general relativity presents particular challenges to student meaning making of abstract concepts which in turn prompt metaimagining. Based on our analysis, we offer recommendations to improve instructional practices in general relativity and argue for the consideration of imagining as a transdisciplinary competency in math and science education

"What is 'the Concept'?" Sites of Conceptual Formation in a Touring Architecture Workshop

This article investigates the development of conceptual understanding in adolescents as a trajectory that spans physical and institutional boundaries. The study follows a group of secondary school students as they engage in a series of museum-led workshop activities related to architecture. A sociocultural approach frames our analysis of the structuring resources that are central to the students’ emergent understanding of a key architectural design concept over a two-day period

Adapting Interaction Analysis to CSCL: a systematic review

Interaction Analysis (IA) (Jordan & Henderson, 1995) is a fundamental reference in the learning sciences, and a core method within the International Journal of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning. Surprisingly, despite the vast number of citations and labs around the world practicing forms of interaction analysis, there have been few if any substantial efforts to articulate its central premises in the context of CSCL. Following a systematic review method, the purpose of this preliminary study is to provide an overview and foundation for investigating the ways that IA has been interpreted and applied in the field of CSCL. Our findings suggest that IA has been applied in a variety of computer-mediated learning contexts and arrangements which have required extending and adapting the method in novel ways. Our broader goal is to consider ongoing methodological and technological developments for the future directions of interaction analysis within CSCL

Exploring participant engagement during an astrophysics virtual reality experience at a science festival

Virtual reality applications turn abstract concepts into experienceable phenomena and present exciting opportunities to transform science education and public outreach practices. While research has started to look into the affordances of virtual reality (VR) in the formal science education context, the potential of these technologies to enhance public engagement with science is largely unexplored. To improve the way that VR may be used in informal learning and public outreach contexts, the purpose of our study was to undertake evidence-based investigations that shed light onto the relationship between VR and public engagement. Aiming to identify and develop the benefits of VR technologies, we propose a conceptual framework for engagement with VR at a science festival that comprises four aspects of participant activity: immersion, facilitation, collaboration, and visualisation. This framework guided the research design of our exploratory case study of one VR tour at a science festival. Data included visitor surveys, video recordings, VR screen captures, and focus group interviews with outreach and science professionals. Our findings reveal important ways that VR supports visitor engagement at a science festival. More generally, these findings and our framework contribute to the ongoing efforts of engaging the public with science in more diverse informal learning contexts

A growing body of knowledge

Science deals with the world around us, and we understand, experience, and study this world through and with our bodies. While science educators have started to acknowledge the critical role of the body in science learning, approaches to conceptualising the body in science education vary greatly. Embodiment and embodied cognition serve as umbrella terms for diferent approaches to bodily learning processes. Unfortunately, researchers and educators often blur these diferent approaches and use various claims of embodiment interchangeably. Understanding and acknowledging the diversity of embodied perspectives strengthen arguments in science education research and allows realising the potential of embodied cognition in science education practice. We need a comprehensive overview of the various ways the body bears on science learning. With this paper, we wish to present such an overview by disentangling key ideas of embodiment and embodied cognition with a view towards science education. Drawing on the historical traditions of phenomenology and ecological psychology, we propose four senses of embodiment that conceptualise the body in physical, phenomenological, ecological, and interactionist terms. By illustrating the multiple senses of embodiment through examples from the recent science education literature, we show that embodied cognition bears on practical educational problems and has a variety of theoretical implications for science education. We hope that future work can recognise such diferent senses of embodiment and show how they might work together to strengthen the many roles of the body in science education research and practice

Imagining with improvised representations in CSCL environments

This study contributes to our understanding of meaning making in CSCL environments by examining a specific aspect of collaborative problem solving in which students improvise, introduce, and make meaning with representations in disciplinary domains. These situations include the embodied and imaginative processes of discovering new representational possibilities and artifact meanings. Much of the research on student-generated representations examines situations in which students are asked by a teacher or researcher explicitly to produce representations. However, we need more knowledge about how students within CSCL settings introduce representations from outside of the designed environment or intended task in order to solve a problem. To unpack the processes of collaborative improvisation and meaning making, we take a sociocultural stance towards imagining. This stance involves considering the socially and materially situated ways that participants express new possibilities and alternative situations that extend beyond the present reality. Focusing on a specific task based on maps as disciplinary representations, we analyze video data of upper secondary physics students working in small groups in a co-located CSCL environment. To characterize shifts across boundaries of several modalities including the verbal and gestural, digital and physical, and 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional, we identify emergent representations as imaginative productions. The findings extend current research on collaborative meaning making by bringing attention to the processes through which improvised representations emerge.. This knowledge is key to facilitating the discovery of representational possibilities in CSCL environments

A Growing Body of Knowledge On Four Different Senses of Embodiment in Science Education

Science deals with the world around us, and we understand, experience, and study this world through and with our bodies. While science educators have started to acknowledge the critical role of the body in science learning, approaches to conceptualising the body in science education vary greatly. Embodiment and embodied cognition serve as umbrella terms for different approaches to bodily learning processes. Unfortunately, researchers and educators often blur these different approaches and use various claims of embodiment interchangeably. Understanding and acknowledging the diversity of embodied perspectives strengthen arguments in science education research and allows realising the potential of embodied cognition in science education practice. We need a comprehensive overview of the various ways the body bears on science learning. With this paper, we wish to present such an overview by disentangling key ideas of embodiment and embodied cognition with a view towards science education. Drawing on the historical traditions of phenomenology and ecological psychology, we propose four senses of embodiment that conceptualise the body in physical, phenomenological, ecological, and interactionist terms. By illustrating the multiple senses of embodiment through examples from the recent science education literature, we show that embodied cognition bears on practical educational problems and has a variety of theoretical implications for science education. We hope that future work can recognise such different senses of embodiment and show how they might work together to strengthen the many roles of the body in science education research and practice