1.3 Research Questions and Purpose

The preceding discussion has thus intimated two broad purposes of the present research.  They are:
•    To investigate how students help each other explore and navigate unfamiliar environments, through an examination of their synchronous discourse, as well as of pictorial clues with which they provide and request of each other;
•    To investigate how students transpose their conceptions of actual locations into two-dimensional representations of space, and the extent to which these transpositions can be successfully communicated to their peers.

The key research questions that delineate the bounds of my study are therefore:
•    how do adolescents seek to explore and understand the local environment in which they find themselves?
•    how are such understandings of three-dimensional environments communicated, through text and pictures, with their peers?
•    what are the mechanisms (including textual and non-textual cues) which adolescents employ to coach their peers to successfully navigate alien environments?
•    how can the technologies of social software, specifically messaging technologies, augment and / or detract from the semiotic processes of making and sharing meaning about place?  In other words, how sound is Myerson’s (2001) hypothesis that ‘a person who had gained knowledge through genuine dialogue might have a richer understanding than someone who had just got hold of the data as swiftly as possible’?

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