#1085: Between Modalities: Observing How Learners Move between Verbal and Digital Spaces in Face-to-Face Collaborative Knowledge Building

This study explores how learners move between verbal and digital modalities during face-to-face collaborative knowledge building with the Idea Wall, a spatially manipulable digital canvas. Using qualitative multimodal interaction analysis, we examined a ten minute small group session where middle school students jointly discussed pollution. We found that verbal narration often amplifies digital actions, supporting joint attention and shared understanding. Learners frequently moved between verbal and digital communication, however, misalignments occasionally occurred when verbal and digital exchanges failed to synchronize, creating temporary attention gaps. These findings help us understand both the affordances and tensions of multimodal collaboration, and inform our ongoing design-based research on refining the Idea Wall for smoother cross-modality collaboration.