3.2.5 Peer critique and presentation

As a penultimate step, students had to paste their pictures and printouts of the SMS exchanges (printed by the investigators) onto a large map of the area.  Classmates who had not participated in the fieldstudy were invited to look at this large composite tableau about the unfamiliar locale, and stick ‘post-its’ onto the tableau.  These ‘post-its’ were questions about the site, in relation to the given six tasks, which students felt were not addressed during the messaging exchange while in the field.  Some were also questions of clarification.

This exercise reflected to an extent what Tversky (1993) terms the ‘cognitive collage’ of our world view.  In describing our cognitive maps as collages, he acknowledges that, unlike the static traditional Euclidean map, the structure of our knowledge representation is contextually dynamic and multi-faceted, one of the primary elements of which are symbolic landmarks.  As described earlier, these landmarks “facilitate the encoding and retrieval of information about spatial location” (Golbeck, 1985).

According to Tversky, therefore, cognitive collages are “thematic overlays of multimedia from different points of views”.  Kress (in press) corroborates this assertion.  He reminds us that whereas speech happens in time, “image, by contrast, is organized by the logic of space.  That which I wish to represent has to be depicted in space, and the relations of the elements that I wish to depict have to be displayed through the semiotic means of space”. 

Finally, the students who participated in the fieldstudy collected these ‘post-its’, and proceeded to craft the end-product (which could have been a skit, presentation, or essay), taking into account the questions from their peers.  In this way, the end-product was therefore a summation of learning about the given issue pertaining to the site, as well as a document of their recommendations, based not only on their own observations in the field, but also tempered with the views of their peers.  This is akin to the work of others, for example Davie (1989) and Paulsen (1995), in using students’ own postings in e-learning environments as a basis for further learning activities and student assessment.

<- 3.2.4 Perspectives task          -> 3.3 Evaluation of design