Collage to represent IDEL
My collage is one of juxtapositions. Three papers contributed to my final interpretation of the spaces of the IDEL course:
Bayne et al (2013) Being ‘at’ university: the social topologies of distance students
Sheail (2017) The digital university and the shifting time-space of the campus
Nordquist et al (2015) Designing spaces for the networked learning landscape
It took me a long time to come up with an image to represent the spaces of the IDEL course. To start with, I felt that to conceptualise a learning space seemed commonsensical. However, I did the readings and spent most of the week thinking. The first useful exercise was to draw a sketch to represent visually Baynes’ paper. I found that once I unpicked the concepts that were discussed, the vision that appeared on the paper was one that I agreed with and related to. I found myself drawing layers, which represented the ‘topological multiplicity’ of the university in relation to distance students and their experiences of learning.
The more I thought about it, the more I decided that my experience of the IDEL course is one of juxtapositions.
The virtual against the real: my virtual avatar and the real me. My hometown and IDEL’s hometown. My learning space and my Minecraft world. Unable to meet for real and making friends through digital worlds. Arrivals and departures in the forums in Moodle, a fluidity (word used by both Bayne and Sheail) between the virtual and the real. My experience of the IDEL course is not one of being absent from Edinburgh, but is one of being present in a odd world that swirls between my family and work space and the 50-odd worlds of my fellow students and tutors. It also occupies the space of my mind and that of databases located in Scotland and no doubt all around the world. The juxtaposition between me alone and a community.
I discovered that my conceptualisation of the learning spaces of the course mirrored those discussed in Sheail’s paper. I read her article last, after having already made my collage. She argues that “the digital location is complex”, which indeed I had discovered. She, interestingly, brought into play the idea of time as well as the spatial discussions that surround distance learning. My experiences of learning within the IDEL course are affected by the “translocality and transtemporality” of my situation related to the IDEL course. My phone pings in the middle of the night, when one of the students in the Far East posts something on the WhatsApp group, and I have to log into calls in the afternoon, as Edinburgh is still ‘asleep’ when my working day begins.
The IDEL course is present on my Nairobi veranda, but is also present on a ferry in Ho Chi Minh City, as well as being present on somebody’s phone on a wintry walk in Berkshire.
Nordquist’s phrase, “the hybridisation of the physical and the virtual” also resonated with me. This is very much what I experienced with Minecraft: meeting some of my fellow students in the virtual IDEL realm. Screenshots of my Minecraft experiences are therefore in my collage to represent this colliding and blurring of worlds – the real and the virtual. The amusement of arranging to ‘meet’ two fellow students and working out how to take a selfie together on the steps of the IDEL MInecraft Campus appealed to my sense of the ridiculous. this was further borne out when Valentin had to step out of the realm because real life became entangled (to use a concept discussed in Bayne et al), and he had to get off a ferry with his motorbike in Vietnam. I was able to screenshot that conversation. He was back after 5 minutes!
I spent an incredibly long time trying to make my image interactive. My critical pathways are not as honed as they could be. Once I had made the image interactive, using PowerPoint, I then discovered I couldn’t attach it to this blog, as it is bigger than 10MB. So, below, is the static collage and hopefully my notes above will help understand why I chose the images I did.
idel picture with explanations
This is a really good summative post for the whole learning spaces block. The various strands of your think from that first post on ‘What is a Learning Space’ (16 Feb) and how they have developed and been added to is really interesting. Your hand-drawn diagram on the collage would, I think, resonate with lots of students and staff on the programme – after all, I have taught this course while located in various parts of the UK as well as in Portugal, Brussels, Indiana, Bahrain, Denmark and Lithuania and with no real obvious differences in what I was doing and how that was being experienced by colleagues and students (except *when* I was active). What’s particularly interesting is how much of the course is hidden from the tutors – your interaction with Valentin, the WhatsApp groups or arranging selfies in Minecraft – but then, is that much different from an on-campus context? As well as as a hybridisation of the physical and virtual, is there also a collapse of boundaries between the course and other experiences of being a student where these boundaries are more clearly marked on the physical campus?
Please could you have another quick look at the blog – I have now added a pdf right at the end, that shows the explanations for each juxtaposition within my collage. They are ‘interactive’ within a powerpoint document, but the logistics of compressing everything so it is a size that I can embed into WordPress, is so time-comsuming, that I prefer to spend my time on the next blogs on openness. When I tried to create a link in google slides it al glitched. I think I fulfilled the collage objectives – thank you for your positive feedback – it is very much appreciated.
The collapse of boundaries between the course and other experiences of being a distance student are indeed present – interesting!