Reflections

Over the course of my observations of Tabletop, my understandings of collaboration, shared knowledge construction, and social constructivism have all grown. By observing a wide variety of games and players, as each episode was unique, I noticed the effects of externalization, experience, and game equipment on negotiations around different types of strategic game play. I altered my research questions across my memos to reflect these evolving observations. After receiving peer feedback, I also changed the wording of my claims in an attempt to make my points more clear.

Throughout my observations of the show, I tried to interpret a level of authentic learning occurring in the games. For this reason, I purposely avoided including any snippets from solo cutaway interviews, which I believed were shot after the end of each game. While these interviews may have provided some interesting insights and reflections from individual players, to my eyes, they appeared inauthentic and possibly even scripted. I thus only included quotes and interactions occurring at the table during game play.

During my first day of observations, I mostly jotted down interesting conversations in my field notes. However, while rewatching the first episode, I realized that gestures and other nonverbal communication also seemed important to note, although I hadn't yet focused on anything specific. In fact, before delving deeply into social constructivist theory, I hadn't realized that external tools and references could profoundly impact the construction of shared understanding. However, reading Stahl's work on CSCL (2006) opened my eyes to the significance of external resources on collaborative learning. Although Stahl focused on the power of computer technology, the reconfigurable game equipment on Tabletop seemed to serve similar purposes. With his work in mind, I began to look beyond just the words spoken on the show, toward the actions being performed with the game pieces. I never turned back. This realization led me toward focusing on players' manipulations of game equipment, which was not initially on my radar in my first set of research questions.

While I expected players on Tabletop to behave differently while competing in teams, to my surprise, players seemed to help each other regardless of whether they were in opposition; I did not observe any major differences between the interactions occurring in team games versus individualistic games. However, my teammates and I began to notice some other interesting phenomena on Tabletop. Specifically, during our weekly meetings, we began to wonder whether the production of the show itself contributed to players’ learning. We began our observations cognizant of the fact that Tabletop videos were edited so we were likely not viewing the full, true story. In other words, we thought the production of the show might hinder our observations. We did not expect the cameras to foster learning, although we believe that is what we found. In relation to developing a shared understanding, players' externalizations, guidance, and manipulations of game equipment likely seemed to have been exaggerated for the cameras. Yet, I believe these actions nevertheless helped facilitate the construction of shared understanding among the group. This was one of the most unexpected, but exciting findings.

Maybe when my friends and I play board games in the future, we should pretend we're on a show, narrating and displaying each of our moves. These techniques certainly seemed to work for the players on Tabletop.