as mentioned in the past couple of entries, i have had to do a bit of rewriting / additional writing :-P
so today i wrote my first case study, and i have sent it off to john to see what he says.
actually, i am pretty chuffed with it, even if i do say so myself :-P
i think the case study has turned out well, and looks to my layman's eyes to certainly add value to the overall thesis (and this is most likely just the first of several! :-) )
for this first draft, i chose the Little Guilin group from the pilot school. what i like about it is that, by adopting the neighbourhoods as the units of analysis (as opposed to the various parts of the intervention like i had done previously), it really allows the complementarity of the various parts of the intervention to show through. this is basically because the case study tracks the progress and activities of the team (in this case, seven students) from pre-test, to their two fieldtrips, and concluding with the peer critique round. using the neighbourhood as the conceptual skeleton has allowed me many more hooks from which to hang off the various bits of data, including many bits which i had previously not known what to do with, such as the photographs taken, the sketch maps, and the comments from the peer critique.
now everything seems to gel together very well, and as john would say, i think i am spinning a rather good yarn :-)
at least this way, the reader has a much clearer idea about what the students did during the entire intervention.
i've also come up with new notations which i can easily append to the existing messaging transcripts. i've already been so impressed that the way that i was led to represent the messaging exchange was flexible enough to incorporate time indices, information on sender and recipient, and, of course, message content (both text and pictures). more recently, i used coloured text to indicate the categories of discourse modes that each message belonged to. the breakthrough today was that i realised i could also use cell colour to highlight the instances when allocentric Frames of Reference (that is, spatial references which are linked to specific objects in one's environment) were used.
you see, i have realised that the picture-messages represent the communication of egocentric Frames of Reference. but such communication is not sufficient during wayfinding. the trick is to pin such egocentric Frames of Reference to allocentric ones as well.
but even then, today's case study has helped me realise that even such a combination is not necessarily a guarantee of success in wayfinding. this is because other factors, such as impetuousness and making invalid assumptions, also play a part.
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