About

Hello. I am an ESRC-funded PhD student in the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh. My research and teaching interests are concerned with learning spaces, digital cultures and multimodality. You can contact me at  j.i.lamb@sms.ed.ac.uk and follow me on Twitter at @james858499.

This is a summary of my Doctoral Research:

Space, Sociomateriality, Sound. The Learning Spaces of Higher Education 
This ESRC-funded thesis is concerned with the ways that the pedagogic and societal shift to the digital is affecting the learning spaces of higher education. My research takes place in the setting of undergraduate courses in American History and Architectural Design, and against the backdrop of a growing critical interest in the nature of university learning spaces. 

Across two semesters I observed students and tutors as they participated in educational activities in a range of settings across and beyond campus. I documented their learning practices and environments through audio recordings, photographs and field notes, including the use of a multimodal journaling exercise where students generated digital postcards of their varied learning spaces. These and other data were used to provoke interview conversation with students and tutors at the end of the academic year.

An important part of my research was the use of sonic material and methods, for instance as I asked how the digital reproduction of sound was implicated in the negotiation of personalised learnings spaces, while at the same time reiterating disciplinary assumptions around epistemology and classroom power relations. My critical interest in sound was support by theoretical in sociomateriality and speculative methods.  



My other areas of current research include the learning spaces of online distance students, multimodal assessment, walking ethnography and sound within social research. ​I am a co-author of the Manifesto for Teaching Online.

I have taught on the Education and Digital Cultures, Assessment, Learning and Digital Education  and Introduction to Digital Environments for Learning courses within the MSc in Digital Education at Edinburgh University. I was a teaching assistant on the recent edX Social Research Methods MOOC. Before all of this I coordinated and taught an academic skills course for students entering higher education. Details of other recent workshops and seminars can be found in my publications page.

Other bits and pieces
​I also look after the Elektronisches Lernen Muzik and Composition: Conversations about Content and Form projects.