Weaving together media, technologies and people: Students’ information practices in flipped classrooms

Purpose: Students in flipped classrooms are challenged to orchestrate an increasingly heterogeneous collection of learning objects, including audiovisual materials as well as traditional learning objects, such as textbooks and syllabi. This study aims to examine students' information practices interacting with and synthesizing across learning objects, technologies and people in flipped classrooms. Design/methodology/approach: This grounded theory study explores the information practices of 12 undergraduate engineering students as they learned in two flipped classrooms. An artifact walkthrough was used to elicit descriptions of how students conceptualize and work around interoperability problems between the diverse and distributed learning objects by weaving them together into information tapestries. Findings: Students maintained a notebook as an information tapestry, weaving fragmented information snippets from the available learning objects, including, but not limited to, instructional videos and textbooks. Students also connected with peers on Facebook, a back-channel that allowed them to sidestep the academic honesty policy of the course discussion forum, when collaborating on homework assignments. Originality/value: The importance of the interoperability of tools with elements of students' information space and the significance of designing for existing information practices are two outcomes of the grounded theory approach. Design implications for educational technology including the weaving of mixed media and the establishment of spaces for student-to-student interaction are also discussed.