Sense-Making Contextualization

One finding from the “Sense-Making” approach to the development of information seeking and use (Dervin 1999) is that people make much better sense of seminar presentations and other scholarly contributions when these are accompanied by the contextual information in the items below.

Author(s)
Title of paper
a) The essence of the project is...
b) The reason(s) I took this road is (are)...
c) The best of what I have achieved is...
d) What has been particularly helpful to me in this project has been...
e) What has hindered me has been...
f) What I am struggling with is...
g) What would help me now is...

Dervin's Sense-Making approach also leads to recommendations about forms of Response that authors and presenters learn most from. By extension, researchers can use analogous forms of response to get the most from what they read or listen to, thus Sense-Making Response as a form of Active Digestion of what you are reading.

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Dervin, B. (1999). “Chaos, order, and sense-making: A proposed theory for information design.” Pp. 35-57 in Jacobson, R. (ed.) Information Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. http://communication.sbs.ohio-state.edu/sense-making/art/artabsdervin99mit.html (viewed 11 Jul 2011).

(See Phase H)