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:
Me as actor / camera operator
and this:
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.
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