Tag Archives: cognitive maps

Ta Dah! The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Doing a Visitors and Residents Workshop

Photo by Steve Rowett @srowett

Me, Lawrie and Dave at Digifest 2015. See how well we work together?  Photo by Steve Rowett @srowett

 

It’s well past time we got these resources available for anyone to use, and I’m glad we’re managing it now.  The intention is to give not just a sense of what activities go into a Visitors and Residents workshop, but also what the motivations for such a workshop might be, and what kinds of larger context and conversations surround and emerge from the workshop activities.

What I’d like to talk about here, in addition to participating in announcing the availability of the workshop guide, is what the maps are for.  Anyone who’s seen me or Dave or Lawrie talk about Visitors and Residents might be forgiven for thinking that the whole point of the exercise is the map.  We use the maps in our talks, in publications, we show them and point to them and talk around them.  We have people produce maps in conference presentations, workshops and professional development events, in student orientations/inductions.  Dave has written a nice review of various ways the mapping has been used and developed, here.  

We spend a lot of time with these maps.  

The maps are not the point.

I’ve been thinking about the mapping process, and what sort of thing it is to me.  In my practice, it’s been a way of helping me visualize the practices of the individuals we were interviewing as a part of the original Visitors and Residents research project.  The interviews we conducted yielded a rich amount of information, and it was occasionally necessary, especially when talking about our research results, to have a relatively easily accessible way of representing practice, while talking about the complexities of people’s engagements with technology and the web.

I use other sorts of mapping processes in my research–the other one that looms large in my practice is cognitive mapping.  In each case, whether V and R mapping or cognitive, the map is the starting point, a way to begin a conversation or anchor an interview around something concrete, a challenge to find in something as hard to materially capture sometimes as digital practice.

Any of these maps are not themselves the participants’ practices, but are representations of a recollection of practice.  They make sense once they are talked about, once the larger context is revealed.  This is why they are particularly useful in workshop contexts, they can stimulate reflection and conversation that can lead to determinations to transform practice, given what participants learn about themselves, and also the practices and motivations of others.

So as with any instrument used in research or in applied contexts, the mapping process needs to be engaged in and analyzed with a broader sense of what else is going on–the interviews or conversations that happen after the mapping are at least as (if not more) important than the maps themselves.  They should not be mistaken for holistic representations of practice–how can they be?  They are snapshots of remembrances, people forget things on their maps that they call out in subsequent conversations.  To mistake the maps for the result is to misconstrue the point of a workshop, a reflective exercise, an interview prompt.

This is a major reason why the guide is more than just activities, but contains long stretches of reflections that Dave, Lawrie and I have written about what might emerge, what it might mean, and how to explore what comes out of the initial mapping process.  

Those explorations are the point.  The maps never have been.

I hope those of you who take up this guide and run your own workshops have fun with it–I have always enjoyed doing them, even as they are exhausting (do it with a partner!  You can take turns and not die at the end!).  

Please let us know how you get on.

networkED: The London University

I had the great pleasure of kicking off this year’s networkED talks at the London School of Economics thanks to the generous invitations of Jane Secker and Peter Bryant.  I was asked to address the theme this year:  what will learning and teaching look like at the LSE in 2020?

A recording of the event has now been posted here.

I am somewhat allergic to future-speak, but do think that there are some useful ways of approaching the “what are we going to do next” question, and I tried to model myself after those approaches.  In particular, I wished my remarks to be grounded in current practice.  Too often, I think, futurism is a feint so that one does not have to deal with the complicated present.  The future can be shiny and seamless and therefore much more easy to discuss.  Also, it hasn’t happened yet.  Anyone can be a futurist.

 

storytime

I started with two stories.

The first was the story of 4 students.  I saw them walking up to the library gates at a UK University, where I was waiting to be admitted as I did not have a card to get me in.  3 of the students walked through the gates with cards, and the remaining student, as their friends waited just beyond the gates, walked up to the desk and said, “I’m sorry, I left my card inside the library, and can’t get in.  I am a student here, please can you check against my name, and let me in?”

The student was let in.

I asked the room:  what happened here?  The room answered:  One of the students was not enrolled at that university, and they did the ID card “dance” to get them into the building, so they could study together.

The moral of that story:  Institutional boundaries are more porous to students than they are to Institutions.

 

The second story I told was about a student at UCL, in the Institute of Archaeology, who when asked about where he did his academic work, started waxing rhapsodical about the Wellcome Library.    He loved that there were huge tables with comfortable chairs, powerpoints all around, “a quiet space that was actually quiet rather than trying to be quiet” and also minus people “waiting for your seat [especially during exam times]”   He loved all of the light in the Wellcome.  It was his “home” library, not his institutionally-affiliate space.

He had a lot in common with a faculty member, also in the Institute of Archaeology, who used the Wellcome Library cafe as his space in which to work, and also to meet with his post-graduate students.  That archaeologist’s map of academic work spaces revealed the affection he has for the Wellcome, with lines of significance radiating from his sketch of it in his network of spaces.

 

UCL15cogmap

Showing the love for the Wellcome Library and Bookshop cafe.

 

The moral of that story:  people’s favorite spaces to work in do not have to be the ones associated with their “home” institutions.  Particularly not in a city like London, where such alternate locations are just down the road, across the street, or next door.

 

What I want to do is ground our sense of what might happen in the Future of Higher Education in the practices of students and staff there right now.  This brings me to a conversation about
“experience” and “lived experience, started by my colleague Nick Seaver on Twitter.

 

Nick got a marvelous response from his colleague Keith Murphy (kmtam), which reads in part:

” for us today to say “lived experience,” aside from its trendiness, is actually signalling something very important regarding a truly ethnographic orientation to the world, one that cares not just about the fact that “something happened to someone,” but that the particular ways in which it happened — how it was understood, felt, and made meaningful”

I’d like us to think about, with all of this talk about “student experience” (which I already have a problem with), what happens if we shift not-so-slightly to a conversation about the lived student experience.  What would a consideration of that mean, if we think about the day-to-day experience of being at University in London, and studying for a degree.

In part, my research into learning spaces reveals that the lived experience of students and staff in Higher Education (and elsewhere)  isn’t tightly bound by institutional location at all.

These cognitive maps show how widespread, scattered, fragmented across the landscapes of London and Charlotte these student and faculty learning networks are.

This UNC Charlotte student goes all over town, to her home, the home of friends, to a 24 hour cafe with amazing pastries, and also to the University.

 

UCL22cogmap

This UCL Student counts as learning spaces her home in outer London, the bus, the Archaeology Library, her “home” Library of SSEES, and Bloomsbury cafe.

 

Student and other scholars’ lived experience is a networked one–they have personal networks, they are starting to build their academic networks, and they are not neatly bounded.  They experience these networks in physical and digital places–these places are also not very neatly bounded, although institutions try to make them so.  In practice, institutions are full of people who are Not Of that Institution.

 

This got me thinking of the work that I do in the Visitors and Residents project, and in particular how we’ve come to refine the mapping process that allows people to visualize their practices.  And in visualizing them, they can recognize their practices in important ways, come to grips with how they might like to change things, think about how to continue doing what serves them well.  It’s the visualizing that can be the hard part.

Because it’s all well and good to want to talk about how people can do more, engage differently, but you can’t change things if you don’t know the shape of the situation to begin with.  

So.  If we start from what we know about student (and faculty) practices around learning spaces:  they treat them as a network.  They do not pay as much attention as institutions do to boundedness (although they do get possessive of spaces).  

What happens, then, when we make these networks, created by lived experience, visible?

Contrast the isolated sense of the any institution represented on a map by itself, with the sea of dots that comes up when you Google “Universities in London”:

What can institutions do to make these networks visible, and therefore accessible to more? What could they do to build those networks further, support them with their own resources, go beyond recognizing current practices to facilitating even more?  What would that mean for how we think about education, place, and belonging in London Universities?

The whole city of London is treated in many ways like a university.  What would it mean to be mindful of that, to move towards that purposefully?  

What would happen if we thought of space as a service, the provision and configuration of learning spaces as a thing that institutions can actually do way more effectively than can any individual or private corporation.  Starbucks/McDonalds/Caffe Nero/Pret don’t care if their establishments are good for studying–even if they frequently are because of free wifi, comfy chairs, and access to snacks.  

Fundamentally, this is a Common Good argument.

Because our students encounter barriers all the time.  In a context where they need more space, not less.  And in a context where universities themselves are acutely aware that they cannot provide all that their students need.   What about leveraging the network of London spaces to be a connected set of spaces, powerful in their mutual awareness, profound in their potential to connect students to other resources, other places, other people.  This is the work of education:  preparing our students for the diversity of experiences that will come their way.  It is more than our work, it is our responsibility.

 

 

What problem are we trying to address when we throttle access?  Is it people we don’t want in our spaces?  Is it discomfort of people who “belong?”  Is it limited resources that we want to conserve for “our community?”

People who work in libraries are used to thinking about who gets to be in and out of the space.  Public libraries in particular struggle with access: who is in the building? who uses services? how can the library serve them?  I think here about about homeless people in public libraries in the US, and policies such as limiting the size of bags people can bring into libraries, which target these populations of people who often have nowhere else to go. Why are the homeless a problem in the library?  The problem of homeless people in the library is about so many other things.  They are matter out of place.  It’s about discomfort, housekeeping, mental health, access.  These problems are not solved by banning people.  Savvy libraries such as the San Francisco public library, and also the public libraries in DC, have moved to hire social workers, have job seeking centers as part of their library services.  They are taking the broader view of what their responsibility is to the people in their spaces.

Likewise London universities concerned about resources for their own community won’t garner the resources they need by banning certain categories of people from their locations.  I would argue rather that they decrease the access of their community members to the value of London.  Let’s remind ourselves again that chopping London into silos goes against the very thing that can make big cities so marvelous.

If Institutions have a reason for being in London, then why would they protect their students from the London experience?

The point was made in the room, quite rightly, that of course many London students are in London because they are from that city, not because they have “Come for the London experience.”  And it’s also very true that not all students experience diversity and difference as something positive to explore, but as members of communities who are victimized and marginalized by perceptions of difference.   In those cases, many students choose to go to university to be with people among whom they do not have to explain themselves, to experience being with others who are “just like them.”  And who might not thank totalizing agendas that valorize “diversity” as something that people should go out and find for personal growth.

I think there is still an argument to be made for networked universities to connect because it provides spaces for students to encounter each other (and all of their similarities as well as differences).  And in being networked with each other, universities can continue to provide places for students to come back to, institutional homes where they gain comfort, and can eventually contemplate ways of feeling safe even as they confront discomforting situations.

Learning places are not monolithic, not in physical space, nor should they be in digital places.  But digital tools can be used to connect physical spaces, to link them and thereby create something even better.

Academic libraries, for example, are starting to think about themselves not as The Learning Place on campus but as a part of a network of learning places, and this is informed by work like mine that shows the lived experience of university students.  Cambridge University is working to build digital tools to make the network of spaces visible, in particular with their SpaceFinder app, which makes it possible to visualize (and so, consider accessing) a wide range of spaces in and around Cambridge University, not just institutional ones.

I ended my talk with a question, What would this look like for all of London?

There are already digital things that network universities in the UK–Eduroam was brought up by the room, and I think it’s a great example.

I did surprise myself rather far along in the discussion with the realization that I am in fact making an open-access argument about the physical resources of universities in London.  I stand by that.  I think it’s worth exploring.

I was also surprised by the lack of discussion in the room around security issues (perhaps that is my bias coming from the US, home of Security Theater).  I was pleased at that lack, it left time for talk about curriculum and education, and class differences that affect how various HE and FE institutions have (or don’t have) resources.

 

The discussion in the room was wide-ranging,And people paused really thoughtfully before digging into a conversation that was shot through with practical and ideological concerns.  I was so pleased to witness and participate.

https://twitter.com/lselti/status/644159059181064194

 

 

 

 

Places, Spaces, Teaching, Learning, Planning

 

No time

Faculty expressed anxiety about not having time to develop curriculum to “maximize effectiveness of the (active learning) room” because the tenure system doesn’t leave space for that, or reward it much if at all.

I had the pleasure of presenting at the National Forum for Active Learning Classrooms (NFALC) on Thursday August 7th, along with my UNC Charlotte colleagues Kurt Richter and Rich Preville (our slide deck is here).  We were talking about our experiences in designing, building, programming, and evaluating our Active Learning Classrooms at UNCC.  And in particular we were pointing to the importance of the Active Learning Academy, the community of practice model we have arrived at to make it more likely that these classrooms will be successful additions to the ways we approach teaching and learning spaces.

We are just starting to put together and think about the information we’ve been collecting this past academic year on the student and faculty practices that occurred in those classrooms.  I’ve been working, with the help of graduate research assistants, on directing observations in a variety of classes, interviewing faculty on their expectations and experiences, and trying to get a sense of how best to influence the development and configuration of learning spaces (not just classrooms) elsewhere on campus.

I have been witnessing, in the last several months a flurry of intensifying discussions around learning spaces, and in particular how to approach planning for them.  We who work in Atkins Library are discussing how to reconfigure our 1st and 2nd floors, and also revisiting our ground floor spaces to see what we can improve.  Jisc has launched a quick guide.  I have been asked to think about giving talks at 3 or 4 different venues by now around teaching and learning and spaces.

What I’d like to point out here is that, based on my experiences dealing with learning spaces in libraries and classrooms, buildings are the least interesting part of the space conversation.  Yes they are necessary prerequisites.  But before they are built, or reconfigured, I would like  people to ask:

  1. what is the activity you want to support?
  2. how does that activity fit into the larger work of the university?
  3. what are the current learning spaces at the university?  Do they relate to each other?  Can they accommodate some of what you want to happen?  Why or why not?
  4. What are the new spaces going to look like in relation to the spaces that are already there?

I see the 3rd and 4th points getting lost in the shuffle a great deal, and it’s frustrating and unnecessarily limiting.  The learning spaces an institution plans will inevitably be in a network of other spaces.  Being not just aware of those connections, but actually leveraging that awareness, making the spaces explicitly connected to one another, raising the visibility of the spaces to teachers and learners alike, can have an impact.  If the activity they want to engage in (group work, for instance) is supported more effectively by a particular kind of space, institutions should not just provide that space but make sure that people are aware it exists.  So what does that look like?  Digital maps?  Tours?  Faculty telling students about where they can work?  Teaching happening in as many different spaces as possible, to demonstrate what is possible across the university?  What else?

Also:  People occupy spaces not just because they exist but because they have motivations to occupy.  There is no “build it and they will come.”  If the space is built and there’s no motivation to engage, they will never show up.  Kitted out classrooms that ignore motivation become just another kind of useless edtech

Another thing I am struck by, and the note we ended our NFALC presentation on last week, was that the least innovative thing about UNC Charlotte’s active learning classrooms are the active learning classrooms.  The SCALE-UP model has been around for 25 years, the research has been done about the efficacy of active learning techniques and environments.  The rooms themselves are not innovative.

BUT.  Innovation can come out of these rooms (and is!).  And that innovation does require a baseline physical setup (which costs money, and involves technology), but to really happen it requires money spent on professional development time for faculty, and in particular on providing time and space to rethink pedagogy.  That is, the building of these spaces can only be the beginning.  Institutions need to commit to providing institutional space (time, resources, money, prestige) to prioritize teaching and learning.  This is why we want to talk less about the technical specifics of the rooms (although we can, certainly, discuss that) and more about the Active Learning Academy, the faculty and staff who trade practices, teach each other, learn from their students, go further with what works, and discard what does not.  We see, in this Academy, experienced faculty stretching themselves because the presence of these rooms frees them from having to jerry-rig active learning practices into spaces such as traditional lecture halls.  Once they do not have to fight the physical space they are in, they can really start to play with what is possible.  

I’d like to emphasize:  you can’t have spaces that generate innovative practices without surrounding them with effective staffing and programming.  Building the spaces is the beginning (or should be) of an iterative process whereby the spaces are programmed, occupied, evaluated, and reprogrammed as necessary.

Who owns the thinking around holistic development of learning spaces at universities?  No consistent set of people.  And teaching staff don’t necessarily have the time or resources to lead that thinking.  There needs to be a dedicated well-compensated team whose work it is to think carefully about learning spaces all the time.

So when thinking about space planning for teaching and learning, there should also be people-planning.  Because these spaces without people, without programming, without communities of practice making them living breathing growing parts of the university’s mission, become accessories, mere performances of teaching, and learning opportunities lost.

 

 

Cognitive Mapping at ACRL2015

2015-03-28 12.22.54

Columbia River Valley. Awesome.

At the end of March I had the great fortune to attend the ACRL meetings in Portland, OR.  I was presenting once again with my drinking buddies colleagues Andrew Asher, Maura Smale, Mariana Regalado, and Lesley Gourlay on our ethnographic work in libraries and universities.  We have all been working with cognitive mapping techniques in a variety of contexts, and we thought it would be fun to not just talk about them but to have people attending our session do their own mapping, and think about how the technique would be relevant to the work they are doing in their own libraries.  I suppose I could have blogged about this under “workshops” but it was a funny hybrid of conference presentation and workshop, one that I thought really worked.

You can see from the Storify that people were really enthusiastic and engaged.  After Andrew introduced the concept of cognitive mapping (I riff off of a version pulled straight from his ERIAL project here), we had the people in the room draw their own maps of their own practices.  People smiled as soon as we asked them to draw, but the room *really* erupted (in a good way!) when we asked them to discuss their map with their neighbors.

CogMaps discussion

People talking to other people about #cogmaps Photo by Maura Smale @mauraweb

 

We then had people report out to the entire room about what surprised them about their maps, either the ones they drew themselves, or the ones that had been shared with them.  As was the case in the workshops I ran in the UK and Ireland in March, I witnessed epiphanies, clear moments when people, simply because they had visualized their practices in a relatively simple way, gained a new understanding of what they do and why–and, more importantly, what they might want to change.

There was nice Twitter participation, Andrew and Maura and I were managing to live-tweet, because we took turns talking (always present in groups you guys IT IS THE BEST PEOPLE ARE FUN).  When we asked people to tweet their maps many did.  I appreciate not just the participation, but also the content of the maps, which reveals just as wide a range of practices as those found among students and faculty in the US and the UK.  Some people mapped multiple locations.

 

Some mapped just a single desk.

Some mapped not just locations, but tools and companions:

The content of all of these maps echo findings collected in our own fieldwork (I have blogged about my own mapping projects already here, here, and here).  What I love about that is that we didn’t discuss our cognitive map examples until after we had gotten people to draw their own.  So the discussion was not esoteric, but grounded in their very recent experience of trying the method , and the things they saw in student and faculty maps could be immediately connected to the things participants mapped for themselves.  You can see the Prezi that we used to illustrate the discussion here.  I believe the slidecast will eventually be made available on the ACRL conference site.

I am a big fan of conference events that require participation, “lean forward” kinds of things that don’t allow for slouching in the back and glazed eyes to set in.    I think if more conference sessions were workshops, roundtables, actual exchanges of ideas, encouraging people to think about or actually do something concrete with the ideas in play, there would be far less of a sense of wasting people’s time, or rehashing old debates.   I was so pleased at the interest in the room, at the specific things that our session made people consider, at the plans for their own libraries that people took away with them.

So, thank you to those who attended, and please keep us all posted on where you take this instrument, and how it affects you and your library going forward!

And keep taking pictures of your shoes, obviously.

 

The Cartography of Learning

So, I’ve been thinking about mapping, not just because I have these maps I collected at UCL in March, but also because I’ve been thinking more about the utility of processes such as the V&R mapping that we have been using in our research.  What Dave White has said to me is that mapping exercises like V&R give us processes to offer people, but no answers, that in fact people use the processes to find their own answers.  It’s not our job as researchers to provide answers, in this framing, but to ask effective questions that prompt people to find their own way.  As usual, my first instinct was to be annoyed by this. My annoyance stems now from thinking that Dave is probably correct.

I am often asked for Answers when I give talks about what is going on with faculty and students and libraries and education generally.  While it’s tempting to try to provide Answers,  I think that I’m much better at coming up with more questions.  And ultimately, that might be more useful, as I think I’m probably not the one who should be Answering.

Cognitive mapping exercises at UNCC and UCL reveal people’s learning landscapes.  Thinking about cognitive mapping in the larger context of mapping exercises  made me consider the possibility of a discussion around the cartography of learning, that is, all the different ways we try to capture and visualize what people are doing when they are learning.  We are mapping (or having people map for themselves) what they perceive to be there, and in the mapping we receive a revelation, not something predictable, or predicting.  We also do not have a precise rendering of actual practices, but an interpretation of practice.  How can we use the maps to build more deeply observed pictures of behavior?  How do we deal with the fact that maps are only ever representations of a lived reality?  “The map is not the territory.”

If the Google Earth of Bloomsbury looks like this:

And the Google Map looks like this:

And the Tube map, itself a concept map of sorts, looks like this:

Then we have a map like this one I collected in March:

For this first year archaeology student, UCL is a series of spaces isolated from each other, but connected by the fact that he needs to do things, different academic tasks,  in each space (my favorite is the professor’s office in the lower left, filled with clutter except for a small clearing in which professor and students can sit to talk).  I can see that these spaces are connected, but he does not represent them that way.

This PhD student has drawn lines indicating how connected her spaces are, the ones in Bloomsbury, and the ones that are not.  She annotated the map with notes about the technology and particulars of the work she does in each space, which places have particular resources (content and people) she cannot get anywhere else, and marks cafes with the cups of tea or coffee that she goes there for.  She has glossed her own map–I can bring my own spin to things (and I will), but there is already interpretation here.

Cognitive maps, the V&R maps, these are all contributing to a kind of cartography of practice.  In the case of the cognitive maps I’ve been collecting from faculty and students, the mapping is an emic process, where the the practitioners themselves represent their own practices as best they can.

In V&R mapping workshops,  people map their own practices, but they are also asked to think about the practices of others.  We’ve done that in the V&R research project as well,  for example in this map, where we took practices invoked by the interviewee and plotted it in the V&R continuua:

map by Dave White and Erin Hood.

Here we engaged in the mapping of the traces of practices of others as an analytical tool, engaging in an etic process, imposing our interpretation of meaning from the outside looking in.

They map, we map, and possible meanings and definite questions can emerge from the process of mapping.

I have been working my way through Latour’s Reassembling the Social with a Twitter group of colleagues, and am only part way through.  Latour invokes the “cartographies of the social” (p.34) when discussing the need for researchers to pay attention to actual practices, to the lay of the networks in play, and to de-emphasize the interpretive leap while still in the process of figuring out what it is we are looking at.  I am also struck by Latour’s insistence that the best social science cannot privilege the perspective of the researcher, but must be embedded in the meanings and practices generated by the people being studied.  This, to me, is a plea for anthropology, but also for the sort of  lack of privileging that mapping exercises like these can inspire–these maps get their meaning from the intentions of the people drawing them as much if not more than from the interpretations we researchers later layer onto them.

Anthropologists are not always fantastic at not-privileging their interpretations of meaning, and I’ve been helped in this regard by the neo-Boasian appeal of Bunzl.  I frequently talk about being a sort of “native ethnographer,” as an academic studying academia, but Bunzl’s critique of the necessity of outsider status to anthropology is making me rethink that.  Our position as “outside” or “inside” is not as important as paying attention to what is present, and describing it as thoroughly and thoughtfully as possible.  It is not that interpretation is impossible, but that what we think things mean can and should be informed by a variety of perspectives, including that of the people among whom we are doing our work.

What is important about the maps, and I think about research generally, is the process, the questions and the discussions they inspire, not the end result.  Thoughts about meaning should emerge from the discussion, from the process, and should never be framed as The Answer.

References:

Bunzl, Matti (2004), Boas, Foucault, and the “Native Anthropologist”: Notes toward a Neo-Boasian Anthropology. American Anthropologist, 106: 435–442. 

 
Latour, Bruno (2007) Reassembling the Social:  An Introduction to Actor Network Theory. Oxford (Oxford University Press). Page numbers refer to Kindle edition.
 

Images:
Google Maps, Google Earth screen shots
Tube map is a crop of:  http://www.tfl.gov.uk/cdn/static/cms/documents/large-print-tube-map.pdf

Post-Digital Learning Landscapes

So I’ve just started to look at what I collected in London last month, but I’ve actually been thinking about and playing with cognitive maps for the past year or so, and I’ve got some preliminary analysis already.

Primarily, what I see in the maps that I collect from undergraduates, post-graduates, and faculty/academic staff are learning landscapes.  There is much talk of learning “spaces,” but I think the problem there with that terminology is that they can be thought of too easily in isolation.  “Landscape” implies a network of spaces, with a relationship to each other.  Some landscapes are extensive, some are relatively local and limited, but they are all networks, and involve buildings, people, technology, modes of transportation, institutional spaces, commercial spaces, domestic places, and so on.  The reasons that people locate themselves in particular places tend to have less to do with the absolute qualities of a particular place, and more to do with a complex calculus of motives, including not just what they want to do in that place, but where they need to be beforehand, and after, with whom they will be (or want to be, or cannot be with).

The map above was generated by a 3rd year student in Project Management for Construction.  He has drawn UCL on the left, and then broken UCL down into the various institutional spaces he visits for his academic work (the Library, lecture halls, tutors’ offices).  These institutional spaces are embedded in a larger network of cafes, domestic spaces, and even (weather permitting) parks.

This MA student in Russian literature has spaces all over London in her map.  Her home has sub-areas she has identified for particular sorts of work, her commute on the bus is earmarked for certain sorts of reading or listening work, and the UCL part of her map includes not just the SSEES library (ostensibly, her academic “home”), but also the Institute of Archaeology library, the Post-graduate common room, the Main library, and various cafe spaces.  She has called out her laptop in the UCL spaces as a crucial part of her landscape.

This faculty member in the Institute of Archaeology has separated his London landscape from his other significant locations, and has included labels for London libraries (the British Library, Senate House, the IoA Library, and in particular the Wellcome Library, limned in red), antiquity societies and museums, the Tube, and his office in the IoA.  Cambridge is important because of its connection to his brother as much as it is for its academic resources.  Yale’s Beinecke gains additional importance because of New Haven’s pizza.  His home setup is represented by him in an armchair with his laptop and a cat.

What strikes me most about these maps, especially given that I followed up the mapping exercise with a structured interview (modeled on the V&R instrument) is the relative lack of representations of “the digital.”  We get some tools (computers, iPods, phones), and occasional representations of places/services such as Dropbox or Evernote, but in general, the digital is shot through these, but invisibly.  If I were to try to layer “the digital” onto a map such as this, it would simply light the entire thing up.

I want to pause here and note that when I first heard “post-digital” in conversation with Lawrie Phipps and Dave White, I was incredibly annoyed.  What on earth could they mean by that?  It smacked of “post-racial,” which in my experience is a phrase used by people keen to deny particular sorts of realities.   But these maps, and the interviews that accompanied them plus the last 3 years (yikes) I’ve spent working on the Visitors and Residents project have apparently made me less resistant to the idea of “post-digital” than I would have been if I’d heard about it when the 52 group (Dave Cormier, Richard Hall, Lawrie Phipps, Dave White, Ian Truelove, and Mark Childs) came up with their concept paper in 2009.

I think I have post-digital learning landscape maps here.  The digital is just understood.  It’s water to these academic fish.  And it’s not just academics; people generally take the digital so much for granted, that when we ask them (as we do in the Visitors and Residents structured interviews) to think about what they do “with technology” or “on the web” they are taken aback, they have to think about disentangling it to talk about it separately, because their everyday practices are so completely wound around digital tools and places.  The role of the digital is practically unspeakable, we in our interviews are asking them to describe what it’s like to breathe.  And when people do talk about technology, it takes very few sentences indeed for them to switch over to talking about people, or information–that is, the stuff they are accessing via technology is far more important, and far more the point, than the technology itself.

From the 52 group’s 2009 concept paper, thanks to Doug Belshaw and his blog for leading the way to the cite:

Not only is the digital subservient to the social, it is, in some ways (and soon most ways), transparent. We are moving towards a postdigital age where the tools driven by the microprocessor are common to the extent to which they will no longer be noticed. As the ‘digital’ calculator and the ‘digital’ watch have become calculators and watches, so will the ebook become a book and IM become ‘message’: the ‘instant’ will be taken for granted. Things digital will be accepted alongside our other technologies and the slate swept clear of many of the distracting dualisms (and technological factions) that pervade the educational discourse. The postdigital frees us to think more clearly and precisely about the issues we face, rather than become tied to an obsession with, and the language of, the new.”