期刊名称：International Journal of Education and the Arts
印刷版ISSN：1529-8094
电子版ISSN：1529-8094
出版年度：2019
卷号：20
期号：20
页码：1-27
DOI：10.26209/ijea20n20
出版社：Arizona State University
摘要：Facilitating collaborative creativity among children involves offering material
resources that support collaborative and creative interactions. Popular views of
tablets, such as the iPad, suggest that they are better suited to solitary game-playing
or video-watching than to collaborative open-ended tasks. I explore this further
through a social semiotic lens, applying the concepts of ‘semiotic resources’ and
‘affordances’ to develop a more nuanced understanding of what tablets have to offer
in relation to children’s collaborative creativity. Through this lens, I compare
observations of six pairs of 5-6-year-old children engaged in a collaborative drawing
task completed either on paper or on the iPad. I apply a thematic analysis to the
children’s dialogue across 25 episodes (15 iPad, 10 paper) and the visual dimensions
of their 41 drawings (23 iPad, 18 paper), and develop three interwoven themes: 1)
attitudes to space, 2) momentum of the line and 3) pathways to representation. For each of these themes, I explore how the affordances of the iPad and/or the particular
application feed into these aspects of the drawing process and the implications of this
for children’s collaborative creativity. The analysis suggests that drawing on the iPad
can be more responsive and less subject to personal planning than drawing on paper.
I suggest that this difference is shaped by physical properties such as the touch-screen
interface, but also emerges as a result of the cultural investment in drawing on paper
as a form of ‘self-expression’, a notion that works to limit exploratory and
collaborative engagement with the resources. Since participants were noticeably open
to exploring new ideas together while drawing on the iPad, I argue that we need to
reassess the potentials of touch-screen tablets to support tasks of collaborative
creativity in educational contexts.
