Research Goal: Finding, structuring and comparing the different affordances that various digital media (computer = laptop, desktop / hand-held devices = e-reader, tablets, smartphones) offer for students learning at a university in comparison to affordances of paper.

By not only comparing affordances of paper with affordances of digital media in general but by comparing affordances offered by different digital media devices with each other we can gain insight into which devices are currently the best alternative to working with paper and which features offered by the different devices are needed to replace paper.

• Literature Review
• Interviews
• Survey
• Contextual Inquiry (Observation)

We want to use the following two weeks to finalize our research question/focus as well as our study design. We want to start doing interviews with student in the second half of December to get a first idea of how and which digital media/paper they use and how. Based on the results we want to design a survey that we can send out in the beginning of January. To gain insight into affordances not explicitly mentioned by students in the survey or interviews because they aren’t aware of them when being asked directly, we plan to observe how students interact with different digital media devices and paper while learning/working for university. Contextual Inquiry can give us reliable and detailed information about that because students can study in their usual environment while we can observe and still ask questions when necessary.