Dialogic intervisualizing in multimodal inquiry

Problem-based learning (PBL) designs are addressing the demands and potentials of an information-saturated era where accessing inquiry resources and new information is reconfiguring tutor-facilitated dialogues. Unclear is how incorporation of CSCL tools and the rich digital multimodal resources they collaboratively access and generate are re-shaping the traditional problem-based cycle of inquiry and intersubjective sense-making. This study in higher education adopts Interactional Ethnography (IE) as a logic-of-inquiry to examine how a group of medical undergraduate students and their facilitator (n = 12) collaborated to access, review, appropriate and devise multimodal digital and visual texts within and across one problem cycle (three face-to-face tutorials and self-directed learning). Drawing on concepts of ‘multimodality’ and ‘intervisuality’ from literacy theory, we extend theoretical understandings of how multimodal texts become actors within a developing PBL event, not just objects of study or cultural tools. Through this multi-focal approach, we make visible how what occurs at one point in time with these texts in the developing dialogic space is consequential for what students can and do undertake in subsequent engagements with such texts in and across one bounded cycle of learning activities. Arising from this analysis, we propose the concept of dialogic intervisualizing to characterize the dynamic interplay between and among information problem-solving processes, textual negotiations and purposeful, facilitated dialogue for deep knowledge co-construction within and across collaborative, computer supported learning activity in an inquiry cycle.