Sensible artefacts for making sense
Anna Sundlöf, Dept. of Tematic studies, Linköping university, Campus Norrköping, S-601 74 Norrköping,
Sweden.
annsu@ituf.liu.se
Lena Tibell, Dept. of biomedicine and surgery, Linköping university, S-581 85 Linköping, Sweden.
lenti@ibk.liu.se
Abstract for poster presentation at the Gordon Conference on Visualization in Science and
Education, Oxford, July 20-25 2003.
This poster intends to give a brief presentation of some general ideas infusing the discourse
concerning the use and production of visual representations in scientific practice, both in the sense
the professional scientist’s, and the student’s learning. Some questions arising out of this will be
outlined. To illustrate how they can be addressed, the poster consists of a description of a project
wherein two media engineering students are observed when undertaking their exam job. This
consists of the production of a haptic model of a jaw (operating in a VR-station), intended for the
use of professional surgeons and radiologists, as well as medicine students in the learning lab. The
engineering students – themselves learners making extensive use of visual representations figuring
on note pads, on the Whiteboard and in their textbooks – have to take into account the inherently
didactic quality of their future model. We briefly describe the analysing process we ourselves, as
learners attempting to make sense of their work, have decided upon – i.e. the model for making our
questions operationable. This consists of a scheme for turn-taking analysis of the students’ dialogue
based on some of the concepts in our analytic tool box, linked to a graphic model of their
movements in regard to ”learning artefacts” (including visual representations) in the room.
Examples of extracted dialogue, photograps and a skiss of the model for analysis is included. Our
hope is to raise some further questions of importance in this field of research in the viewers, so that
they can help in visualising our own blind spots concerning the aptness of our analytic approach.