The Node Modality Project
This is an initial iteration of the immersive and interactive project. There was a strong user experience focus, engaging audience participation in the discussion, thus shaping it. The image represents a web of semantic meaning created by analyzing student's written responses to "How is leadership like a role?" and "How is leadership like a relationship?" When viewing the mock up created by these semantic nets, clicking on various words or nodes highlight their corresponding pathways of meaning.
The Node Modality Project, through interacting live with the audience, demonstrates the pedagogical resonances of non linear communication in higher education. The 2012 York University interPLAY conference it was presented at approached information as medium and focused on the play between creativity & information.
Participatory interactive engagement has important pedagogical implications as the demand shifts in viewer behaviour back and forth between reception and participation. The benefits of using interactive digital technology resides in its potential to be a means of promoting critical reflection.
Later iterations- at TedX Distillery District Women, Invented Here 2013- included a web of meaning created from harnessing the tweets of audience members dialoging with and thus informing the discussion, live. The role then of the speaker onstage was to facilitate and join in the co-voicing of audience members interacting with this user driven mode of communication.
The foundation of these ideas, in line with Mikhail Bakhtins’ discussion of heteroglossia- or multiple voices co-voicing, is to enrich critical reflection by introducing the medium of the Internet with its’ rhizomatic capacity to explore textual communication. This project had a corresponding paper, that was presented at York University's interPLAY conference, which was later published on Iain Baxter&'s raisonne.
