{"id":1757,"date":"2012-11-19T17:34:10","date_gmt":"2012-11-19T17:34:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk\/?p=1757"},"modified":"2012-11-22T16:04:48","modified_gmt":"2012-11-22T16:04:48","slug":"vr-mapping-at-educause","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/2012\/11\/19\/vr-mapping-at-educause\/","title":{"rendered":"V&R mapping at Educause"},"content":{"rendered":"

What I was first reminded of at Educause 2012<\/a> in Denver was how much money is tied-up in educational technologies. The Expo was a daunting journey into the world of CIO budget power – the kind of issues my research makes visible did not appear to be top of the agenda. I fended off my feelings of alienation with the reflection that the attendees of this conference were exactly the kind of people who I should be \u2018disseminating\u2019 our findings and approach to. This was not going to be cosy preaching-to-the-converted situation in which we got to discuss the esoteric side of becoming-a-legitimate-participant, digital fluency or the shifting nature of credibility on the web. Add to this the fact that our session was scheduled for 8am on Friday and you can probably see why I was expecting a handful of participants who may have\u00a0accidently\u00a0wandered into the wrong room.<\/p>\n

\"Denver\"<\/a>

My view of Denver<\/p><\/div>\n

I was encouraged somewhat though by the number of people who approached me to discuss the challenges of \u2018MOOCing\u2019 the Humanities after my question on this to Harvard\u2019s CIO who was speaking about edX<\/a>. (I\u2019m not saying that projects like edX\u00a0aren’t\u00a0game changers but they seem to have confused experimenting with business\/access models with \u2018revolutionising learning\u2019. At least that\u2019s how the presentation came across.)<\/p>\n

Friday, 7.30AM \u2013 and myself,\u00a0Donna Lanclos<\/a> & Lynn Connaway<\/a> were so focused on trying to find enough dry-wipe markers for our session that we\u00a0didn’t\u00a0notice the room filling-up. By the time we were due to start we had about 60 people and some of them looked fairly awake.<\/p>\n

\"Mapping\"<\/a>

Proof that some people were awake while ‘mapping’<\/p><\/div>\n

In the room were Heads of elearning, Deans, Library Directors, Senior Learning Technologists etc. People who are paid to make high-level strategic decisions about the approach of their staff and institutions.<\/p>\n

The format of our session was very interactive: Starting with a brief overview of Visitors and Residents (the project<\/a> and the idea<\/a>) and then straight into attendees mapping their own personal engagement with the web on the Visitor\/Resident\u2013Personal\/Institutional quadrant. I had shown a version of my engagement map<\/a> created in a Google Drawing and put my Gmail address up on screen in the hope that people might share their maps. Almost everyone got stuck into the exercise and against my expectations over the next 15 minutes a few Google drawings did arrive along with a couple of photos of whiteboard maps. This meant we could talk through the results of the activity on the main screen using some examples drawn from the room. We had gone from outlining the Visitors and Residents idea to producing and discussing participant\u2019s modes of engagement with the web in less than 30 minutes. It was the ultimate workshop turnaround and it got people talking because we had quickly moved from discussing an idea in the abstract to deconstructing the actual engagement behaviour of those in the room.<\/p>\n

We then asked the attendees to map the engagement of their \u2018clients\u2019 (e.g. academics, student, researchers, library users etc.) with the services they provided in their institutions. Again I received a couple of Google Drawings which led to a brief discussion about the challenges of providing institutional services that are designed to engage in a Resident mode. In hindsight we could have done with about 20 minutes longer but I felt we had cracked the Visitors and Residents workshop format. We certainly got good feedback, including one participant who said that if we could put the workshop format online he could use it \u201call the time\u201d at his institution. I started to wonder if we should extract the mapping elements of the proposed\u00a0Visitors and Residents course<\/a> and post them as a do-it-yourself workshop format.<\/p>\n

During the hour after the session I received a few more personal engagement maps in a variety of formats, Google Drawings, pics of whiteboards\/notepads and an Evernote Skitch. I gathered some of these together on the plane home:<\/p>\n

\"Educause<\/a>

Educause – Personal V&R maps<\/p><\/div>\n

Full-size version<\/a><\/p>\n

There is a wealth of intriguing information here but the aspect which is most immediately striking and which came out during the session is how the same platforms are engaged with in a variety of ways. To demonstrate this I have highlighted the location of Facebook across the maps.<\/p>\n

\"V&R<\/a>

V&R maps – Facebook highlighted<\/p><\/div>\n

Full-size version<\/a><\/p>\n

This didn\u2019t come as a surprise to me as the data from our Visitors and Residents project shows that many people use Facebook privately (Messaging or 1-to-1 IMing) or organisationally (keeping track of friends\/colleagues but not posting or communicating via the platform). This supports one of the original tenets of the Visitors and Residents idea which is that discovering *what* technology people use does not give an insight into *why* they are using it or even, it would appear, what they are actually doing.<\/p>\n

\"Skype<\/a>

V&R map – Skype and GTalk highlighted<\/p><\/div>\n

Full-size verison<\/a><\/p>\n

A pointed example of this can be seen in the most detailed map submitted wherein the functionally equivalent technologies of Skype and GTalk are mapped to different places because they are being used as a method of keeping certain areas of life compartmentalised (as an attempt to fend off personal\/institutional convergence, or the \u2018decompartmentalision\u2019, that tends to be a side effect of Residency)<\/p>\n

It was very rewarding to see the Visitors and Residents idea being used as a tool for reflection and planning. I hope that many of the relatively senior people who attended our session will be taking V&R thinking back to their institutions. I felt it was worthwhile equipping some of the Educause delegates with this approach as it should prove to be a useful way for them to understand their students\/clients when they are bombarded with claims about efficiency, student retention and \u2018intuitive\u2019 platforms at the next big edtech expo.<\/p>\n


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