Any views expressed within media held on this service are those of the contributors, should not be taken as approved or endorsed by the University, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University in respect of any particular issue.

Blog posts from my participation in Introduction to Digital Environments for Learning, amongst other stuff

Month: December 2016

Week 11 activity: what kind of space is IDEL? (part 2)

On reading Cousin, G. (2005). Learning from cyberspace. In R. Land & S. Bayne (Eds.), Education in Cyberspace. Abingdon: RoutledgeFalmer I was struck by the following quote from Davis, E. (1998) TechGnosis, Harmondsworth: Penguin

The moment we invent a significant new device for communication – talking, drums, papyrus… – we partially reconstruct the self and its world, creating new opportunities (and new traps) for thought, perception and social experience [my emphasis].

It was this, the sense that we should be aware of how we (re)construct our world that led me to the metaphor below.

The obvious metaphor feels like a literal virtual campus. Again, as quoted in the Cousin paper, Oxford University invites their students:

… to visualise a virtual learning environment … [as] the plan of the campus of any educational establishment with which you are familiar.

I could have built a plan of campus, including the library, IT help, student union etc and used this to represent their online equivalent. And in fact this is frequently how University’s do attempt to represent themselves. As mentioned in Bayne, S., Gallagher, M. S., & Lamb, J. (2014). Being ‘at’ university: the social topologies of distance students. Higher Education, 67, 569-583 this is one of the many ways in which the “privileging of the bounded space of the campus is played out” (p.576).

Furthermore, I wanted to demonstrate how, as Cousin puts it so succinctly, “the medium is the pedagogy” (p.117). Or, as stated in  Bayne, S., Gallagher, M. S., & Lamb, J. (2014). Being ‘at’ university: the social topologies of distance students. Higher Education, 67, 569-583:

“What it means to be ‘on the course’, or to be ‘at’ Edinburgh, is never one thing—it is always multiple, enacted differently for every student almost at every moment.” (p.580)

Here is a very basic interactive graphic demonstrating my IDEL metaphor (explained in previous post).

For this graphic I used Thinglink. The basic (free) version doesn’t allow for the upload of images to accompany the on-hover states. I had hoped to include further images from the 59 Productions video to better explain my concept. Images like this:

screen-shot-2016-12-06-at-12-30-22

Me as actor / camera operator

and this:

screen-shot-2016-12-06-at-12-29-57

Me as mixing desk operator, choosing my ‘shots’

 

I hope the metaphor conveys a sense of layered, textured, multiple perspectives enacting simultaneous multiple realities of what it means to be ‘on’ the IDEL course.

 

Week 11 activity: what kind of space is IDEL? (part 1)

Tasked with thinking about a suitable metaphor for the IDEL course (or rather my experience of the IDEL course) I imagined myself at a mixing desk. A little like this:

Sitting alone with an array of tools at my fingertips, with the recommended texts represented here by the original audio recordings. Each selection on the mixer would produce a different texture, a different quality, would reveal something new. The near infinitesimal number of possible outputs was exciting, and simultaneously overwhelming. This simultaneousness also struck a chord. If I was to try and distil the main theme of the course in one word it would be “and”. Recognising that something can be both present and distant, closed and open, transparent and hidden, has been essential to my understanding of the themes raised.

Except I’m not really alone am I? I have a personal tutor to guide me. And a team of tutors who are guiding the whole cohort through the myriad of texts, themes, approaches. And then there’s my peers. I know they’re there because I can see them interacting on the discussion boards.

So, I tried to think through the mixing desk metaphor a little further and thought about 59 Productions Live Cinema performances. Here is a short video about the process of making a “Live Cinema” performance:

What I find fascinating about this approach to live performance is the technique (simultaneously depicting the scene and showing the artificial creation of that scene) and how in making transparent the artificiality of the image doesn’t diminish the image but adds to it. It is able to create multiple, synchronous realities.

I think the metaphor continues to work when we consider the IDEL course as a performance. Each instance of the course is a new performance, with new actors (students) – all directed by the IDEL teaching team. I am simultaneously both an actor on stage and the mixing desk operator, selecting which shots to include in the projection.

I heart the Library

I referenced in an earlier blog post that I have become particularly fond of the 5th floor of the University Library in George Square. In fact I am here again as I type this. I went to check in via FourSquare and noticed the following comment from Pearson – Always Learning:

George Square Library gets the thumbs up

George Square Library gets the thumbs up

 

So I am clearly not alone in favouring this spot for some quiet, reflective study. A simple look around me also tells me this. In Week 12 (revision week) there is not a spare desk to be found. It occurs to me that there are multitudinous reasons why this space is favoured:

  • it is warm (it is currently -3°C outside)
  • there is no cost to entry (except of course a valid student or staff ID card)
  • there is no cost to staying
  • it is quiet
  • it has plug sockets for your mobile devices (well, ordinarily it does)
  • it has printers
  • it has books
  • it has lots of other people doing something very similar to yourself.

It is this last point which I think warrants emphasis. Does being surrounded by people engaged in a similar activity to you help create a sense of community (even if you are not talking to any of them)? I think it definitely helps combat any sense of isolation which is often cited as a downside to online study.

Finally, I want to mention how the sounds of the library (the hushed whispers, the crinkling of a crisp packet, the unzipping of a bag) bring to mind the sounds associated with ASMR. If I were to record these sounds (for the purpose of listening to them in a non-library environment) I should therefore utilise the binaural recording method¹.


¹ @Phil – I would love to hear the soundscape you recorded for the Library project. Where did you place the mics?

I know this blog post has no academic value. I just wanted to log my thoughts. Happy to remove before submitting if you think appropriate.

 

Expectations of privacy

I’m a keen follower of Robert Sharp’s blog. In his speech arguing for a better debate around no platforming on campus, I was struck by the following:

“Having people read over your shoulder chills free expression! In order to write, think speak freely we need an expectation of privacy” (my emphasis).

This seemed to me to encompass a few of the issues we have covered in recent weeks on the IDEL course. I was surprised to find that the ‘spaces’ theme covered in weeks 10 and 11 didn’t touch on the concept of ‘safe’ spaces (or perhaps it did and I missed it). Does an ODL student require a safe space as much as an on-campus student? What would this look like? Is a statue of Cecil Rhodes just as offensive to an ODL student as it is to an on-campus student who has to walk past it every day? As covered in my recent post on being ‘at’ and ‘in’ Edinburgh, we experience campus in multiple ways.

It also, I think, touches on the discussion we had in weeks 8 and 9 on data analytics. Do data analytics have the same potential to chill free expression? What if, by being transparent about the data the institution collects from the student, we are not empowering the student to make more informed choices but rather run the risk of them attempting to play the game, and do what they think is expected of them? Or perhaps we should just accept that Big Data is a thing and it is therefore morally incumbent on the institution doing the collecting to help students with how to interpret this (in much the same way that the Managing your digital footprint project tries to do with students’ social media presence)?

Finally, what does an expectation of privacy mean in relation to a class? Are classes private spaces? Does moving them online (with the resultant shift from speaking to writing, or perhaps more accurately the shift from something impermanent to permanent) change how students experience the class? Or in the age of social media do we (as students) only feel that we have experienced learning if we have logged it somewhere digital (ie not via any Ars Memoria technique)? I am reminded of the example given in week 1 of the IDEL course where ‘Joe’ takes a photo of himself reading a course paper and then tweets it to prove that he is studying.

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén

css.php

Report this page

To report inappropriate content on this page, please use the form below. Upon receiving your report, we will be in touch as per the Take Down Policy of the service.

Please note that personal data collected through this form is used and stored for the purposes of processing this report and communication with you.

If you are unable to report a concern about content via this form please contact the Service Owner.

Please enter an email address you wish to be contacted on. Please describe the unacceptable content in sufficient detail to allow us to locate it, and why you consider it to be unacceptable.
By submitting this report, you accept that it is accurate and that fraudulent or nuisance complaints may result in action by the University.

  Cancel