Collboard: Fostering new media literacies in the classroom through collaborative problem solving supported by digital pens and interactive whiteboards

Abstract

Education systems worldwide must strive to support the teaching of a set of New Media Literacies(NMLs). These literacies respond to the need for educating human capital within participatory cultures ina highly technologized world. In this paper, we present Collboard, a constructivist problem solving activityfor fostering the development of specific NMLs in classrooms: collective intelligence, distributedcognition and transmedia navigation. Collboard encompasses successive individual and collaborativework phases that prompt active student participation and engagement. It integrates digitally augmentedappliances, namely, digital pens as a means to support individual work, and interactive whiteboards asa collaborative knowledge construction space. We report on the conceptual design of Collboard, itsdifferent technological and software components, as well as our findings from experiences we conductedin a Swedish school with 12 students from a 7th grade maths class. Findings from the experience providean indication that Collboard can be well integrated in classroom teaching, and that it can foster thedevelopment of collective intelligence, distributed cognition and transmedia navigation in differentknowledge domains