Student Smartphone Experience Narratives Mediated by the Phygital School Library for Learning Ecosystems

Abstract

This paper reports a Case Study that took place in the educational community of the D. Maria II school cluster at Famalicão, Portugal, from October 2019 to October 2021. It integrated 236 participants—students, teachers, and parents—with the goal of identifying the students´ daily infocommunicational experience narratives on their smartphones, capable of also being used for classroom activities. A Design-Based Research process was used with a conceptual prototype that simulated user narratives. The findings of this study were proposed as a heuristic model of infocommunicational services that students would like to have on their smartphones to be used in/out of the classroom with the mediation of the physical and digital (phygital) school library. Socialization and collaborative learning solutions were the most popular, such as student/teacher profile information, peer assessment, inter-student and teacher infocommunication possibilities, and student performance continuous follow-up. This study’s research process revealed potential to be used in other school ecosystems and the school library and librarian teacher proved to be absolutely fundamental agents to mediate the development, discussion, and validation of the findings and final results.