A learning space should inspire, enable, provoke and interest….

Observations

There were several common themes running through all the metaphors that the IDEL students came up with on the forum. Some of the concepts of a learning space that we chose to define through our metaphors were:

• learning takes place anytime
• learning takes place alone but also with others
• the importance of the social (human relationships), as well as the material (subject matter)
• the relevance of choice
• the presence of a variety of emotions in learning: excitement, fear, boredom
• safety versus challenges
• accidental, serendipitous learning (the phrase I like so much ‘ambush-learning’)

A lot of our metaphors could be defined as ‘orientational metaphors’, the phrase coined by Lakoff et al (2003), in ‘Metaphors we live by’. These metaphors ‘have a basis in our physical and cultural experience’. For example the metaphor of a Starry Sky: this conveys aspiration, opportunity, a myriad of possibilities.

The metaphor of a meal or dining table, that Fiona Almond and Robert Chmielewski (fellow students) thought of, encapsulates the concepts of choice, pleasure, socialising, sometimes the meal is delicious, sometimes it not. (a great feel good Coke advert – if only learning was always like this!)

Lakoff et al argue that a metaphor can only ‘serve as a vehicle for understanding a concept by virtue of its experiential basis’. This was certainly the case of a number of the metaphors we chose, where we used personal events and experience to conceptulise a learning space.

We chose positive metaphors to express learning spaces. Metaphors that conveyed expansiveness. We chose positive language to describe those metaphors: words such as ‘interdependence’, ‘serendipitous’, ‘anytime, anywhere’, ‘creativity’, imagination.

How is learning best represented? Like this?

Or like this?

Comment on our Metaphors of Learning Spaces / Emma Morton / An introduction to digital environments for learning (2020/2021)[SEM2] by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0