Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

The interview questions included the inquiry of their general backgrounds, including their prior
experience with similar worlds and practices, their reflections on the overall design and process of
designing virtual places, and their general ideas on affordances and limitations of SL as a
collaborative platform for content generation 7 . As a general rule of thumb throughout the
interviews, I aimed to stay active and alert to determine particular leading topics of discussion, and
ask probing questions to evoke reflective responses and discussions for further elaboration (i.e.
Mann and Stewart 2000, Charmaz 2002, Kvale and Brinkmann 2009).
The choice of using focus group interviews with the workshop students aimed to tap the possibility
of generating a lively collective discussion on group processes and bring forth expressive and
emotional views in the course of collective interaction (Tonkiss 2004, Kvale and Brinkmann 2009).
Although conventional focus groups usually involve six to ten people, my student participants
consisted of 3 groups of 4 and 1 group of 3 students. Students are involved in the research as
learners who had an intensive 3-week experience with SL, after which they produced and presented
designs to a public audience. In this respect, I was more concerned with the internal formation and
negotiation of accounts within each group in relation to their collaborative processes. As expected,
specific parts of the student discussions were particularly rich and interesting in terms of their
collective reflections and critical remarks.
Transcription and coding of the interviews were done in accordance with the grounded theoretical
procedures of initial coding and selective or focused coding (Charmaz 2002). As I have discussed in
the previous chapter and outlined in Figure 5.1, the initial coding of the interviews is used to
categorize the data on the social actors, the places and practices of collaborative design, and the
products of designing. In the more focused stages of coding, several codes were generated to
explore the relational patterns between the semiotic resources, the socio-technical contexts and the
meaning potentials in virtual places. Some of these codes emphasized the co-designers’ personal
backgrounds, skills and resources, whereas others explained how practices are organized by the use
of these skills and resources. The experiential, interpersonal and textual meaning potentials, as
they were interpreted by the co-designers, are the central categorizes in the analysis of virtual
places and artifacts, as well as the interview discussions on these issues. My overarching aim in
using the GTM perspective to dynamic coding of the multimodal data is to be able to reflect on the
dynamically constructed meaning patterns among participants of the three case-studies. I used
standard word processing applications for transcription and organization of data, and made use of
the qualitative data analysis software Atlas TI for the intensive coding and analysis procedures. In
order to answer the continuously developing analytical questions, I explored the data for insights
7
See the Analytical Framework flowchart (Figure 5.1) for further details of the interview topics and the coding process.
136