Good to collaborate again with Lucila Carvalho (Massey University, New Zealand), and to work for the first time with Cristina Garduño Freeman (UNSW, Australia).

We came together to write about the use of citizen science in learning spaces research. Our article has just been published in Postdigital Science and Education and is available here. It’s part of a Special Issue on the theme of 'Postdigital Citizen Science', organised by Sarah Hayes and Michael Joplin.

My main contribution involved helping us to argue for the value of visual methods in learning spaces research, and demonstrating how these approaches are especially suited to citizen science. I’m always a bit surprised that published research around learning spaces is often light on images. After all, learning spaces are overtly visual, and that applies to online as well as physical environments. To my mind, the use of images, and especially photographs, nearly always makes for a richer account of a learning space, while at the same time helping to situate the reader in that setting. 

To give you an example, here’s a photograph from my own research that I often use to help explain some of the central ideas of postdigital thinking. In ways that I think it would be difficult to adequately convey solely through words, the photograph captures how digital technologies have become a part of the everyday fabric of educational environments. The photo also neatly illustrates another postdigital assumption, in showing how digital technologies and practices often coalesce with, rather than replace, longer-standing technologies, objects and activities.

​It’s not that images work in isolation in telling the story of a learning space, but rather that visual materials and methods can productively combine with other forms of inquiry: ethnographic observation, interview conversation, multimodal analysis, and more.  We make these points in our article. What we also do is explain that the potential for using visual methods within learning spaces research has been considerably helped by the proliferation of digital devices across society. Anyone who owns a smartphone has the potential to photograph or film their surroundings. They can use the same device to edit, store and then the material they generate. 

That visual methods have increasingly become accessible is of considerable help when we want to use citizen science in researching spaces for learning. Without suggesting that everyone has a smartphone, it’s nevertheless true that these devices are widely owned, and that they come with a camera and accompanying image-focused software as standard. What this means for learning spaces research, is that anyone with a smartphone has the means to document their educational surroundings (albeit with the usual caveats around ethics).

Crucially, the simplicity of the smartphone camera - swipe-point-press - can enable the citizen scientist to document those places, practices or phenomena that they see as most personally significant. It also provides a way of getting a glimpse into the domestic or impromptu learning spaces that it would be ethically and practically difficult for an ‘outside’ researcher to document.

We cover a wider range of topics than this in our article, but I've focused upon this idea as I think it’s a really powerful way of showing the how we might combine citizen science and learning spaces research in our postdigital times.


​Carvalho, L., Freeman, C.G. & Lamb, J. (2024). Learning Spaces of Higher Education for Postdigital Citizens. Postdigital Science and Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-024-00504-1

I’m writing while listening to Time Out, an album of jazz music recorded in 1959 by The Dave Brubeck Quartet. The music, and its 180g blue vinyl pressing, are more sophisticated than the words that will follow.   

I’m listening to Time Out on a Lenco LBT-188 turntable, connected by BlueTooth to a Marley Get Together 2 Mini speaker. 

These audio technologies are resting on a mid-1960s sewing table that I picked up from a local charity shop, before polishing and repurposing it as a suitably hip space (in my eyes) for playing records. 

Why did I bother to arrange this audio set-up when I can listen to Time Out and just about every other album through streaming services like AppleMusic and Spotify? Streaming would be cheaper, and it’s not as if I can listen to records while walking to and from campus.  

The answer is that the value of music comes foremost through the pleasure it brings, and perhaps we lose sight of this by celebrating the convenience and efficiency of listening. Music performs many roles, but it’s there to be savoured, not simply accessed. That’s my take, anyway.

Some of this pleasure comes from the ritual of lifting stylus onto vinyl and then eagerly anticipating the music starting: compare with the soulless touch-screen operation of a streaming service. There’s also aesthetic pleasure in the carefully designed record sleeve and set of liner notes, something that can’t be found in the thumbnail artwork of the digital version. And when I lift my gaze above this laptop screen, there’s pleasure in seeing the rotating record: the music is ‘happening’, literally and figuratively.

Admittedly, this is an expensive way of listening to music. I’m fortunate in being able to afford the cost of a fortnightly trip to Thorne Records, and then an annual pilgrimage to Crocodisc in Paris, and Portsmouth’s Pie & Vinyl. I don’t own a fancy watch or car, but I do have a small collection of beautiful records, and I’m happy with that.

To be clear, my approach to music-listening isn’t a rejection of the digital. How could it be when the music I’m listening to right now is coming through a combination of digital and analogue technologies? And, although it wasn’t the case in this instance, if my copy of Time Out had come with a download code, the same songs would also be stored in the iTunes folder on the laptop that I’m using to write these words. At other times I listen to music via my iPhone.

In my view, one of the most productive aspects of postdigital thinking is that it helps us to see beyond the hype that accompanies the emergence of new technologies. We instead greet the latest ‘breakthrough’ digital device or service as something that will probably exist alongside, and merge together with, pre-existing objects and practices (see for instance my combination of analogue and digital audio technologies described above).

Relatedly, with a postdigital outlook, we are sceptical of claims which proclaim that digital technologies are going to revolutionise our educational or everyday lives, as super-efficient and sophisticated devices or systems sweep away what currently holds sway. The portability and sound reproduction of the compact disc was supposed to have killed off vinyl, but here I am listening to a repress of a record made 65 years ago. The same charity shop that sold me the sewing table pictured above won’t accept donations of my CDs, such have they lost their worth.

Since the point that it was first conceived, postdigital thinking has combined with critical work around music, listening and sound. In 2000, electronic music composer Kim Cascone used ‘postdigital’ while arguing for the productive value of glitches in music production, and postdigital ideas have since been used to explore the changing nature of the music industry, learning soundscapes, the politics of sound, and beyond.

This work and more is discussed in an entry I’ve written  for the Encyclopedia of Postdigital Science and Education, covering the subject of ‘Postdigital Sound’. You can access the encyclopedia entry here. You can listen to Time Out by The Dave Brubeck Quartet on AppleMusic, Spotify and YouTube music, or even better, buy a vinyl copy for around £15.

Cascone, K. (2000). The aesthetics of failure: ‘Post-digital’ tendencies in contemporary computer music. Computer Music Journal, 24(4), 12–18. https://doi.org/10.1162/014892600559489.

Postdigital Learning Spaces : Towards Convivial, Equitable and Sustainable Spaces for Learning. Published by Springer as part of the Postdigital Science and Education series. 
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A little under two years ago, Lucila Carvalho and I started to work-up plans for an edited collection to build upon the momentum created by our Special Issue (with Michael Gallagher and Jeremy Knox) around the Postdigital Learning Spaces of Higher Education (Lamb et al. 2022). 

With our edited collection, Lucila and I were keen to explore how some of central ideas of postdigital thinking were playing-out in learning spaces beyond traditional and tech-privileged university classrooms. And we wanted this to be done in ways that might share or propose ways of nurturing learning spaces that can be convivial, equitable or sustainable. At the same time, with a view to generating original perspectives and critiques, we wanted to work with researchers and practitioners who were not already immersed in the postdigital field.

The different authors we invited to contribute to the project have really delivered on our hopes for the book, as it is contextually, geographically and methodologically diverse (and beyond that, also a great read, as Petar Jandrić notes in his Series Editor’s Preface). As we signal in our Introduction, reading the collection from cover-to-cover involves taking a critical journey that begins in sub-Saharan Africa, before following a path that ventures into the Peruvian Andes and the Swiss Alps, winds its way through the streets of Sao Paulo and central Edinburgh, and stops off in, among other places, Sweden, Australia and New Zealand. Along the way there’s an opportunity to watch the affective play of children in museums and playgrounds, to visit an exhibition where migrant perspectives are shared through postdigital media, and to observe students in conversation in the outdoor classroom.

There are learning excursions through the postdigital city and aboard the transcontinental train journey, and insights into learning spaces associated with Long-Covid, and in workshops where connections are made with plants, trees and the natural world. Beyond that, we tune-into the ways that writing spaces can be shaped by music, and we use author-generated photographs as a way of explaining some of the postdigital assumptions that are most useful in helping us to understand spaces for learning.

This isn’t a complete list of the studies and stories presented across our collection, or indeed what Lucila and I feel they collectively have to say about how we might nurture positive postdigital spaces for learning - you'll need to see the book for that! Hopefully, though, you'll have a feel for the book and might want to explore further. 

Lucila Carvalho (Massey University), Pippa Yeoman (University of Sydney) and I recently contributed to a symposium at the annual meeting of the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS). We talked about three chapters from the edited collection that Lucila and I have put together, Postdigital Spaces of Learning: Towards Convivial, Equitable and Sustainable Spaces for Learning. The title of our session was 'Tracing connections and following the action: how sociomaterial and postdigital sensibilities help us appreciate the learning whole in action'.
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In the symposium Pippa talked about her (incredibly moving and insightful) autoethnographic account of attempting to learn how to live with Long-Covid. In a strong field, it’s maybe my favourite chapter in the book (or my current favourite, anyway). Lucila described how we used photographs from the contributing authors in our book as a way of exploring and explaining some of the central assumptions of postdigital thinking, and what it has to offer learning spaces research. And I recounted aspects of an experiment where I considered whether and how the train journey could function as a postdigital learning space. Here are our three presentations:

Our contributions were part of a wider symposium, ‘Interrogating and Recoupling Learning and Knowledge with Networks and Power: Exploring Sociomateriality as a Foundational Theory for Research in the Learning Sciences’, and was expertly organised by Michael M Rook.  Michael is an independent researcher, and also Program Evaluator in the Directorate for STEM Education at the U.S. National Science Foundation. Michael’s input to the symposium was based on work supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), but I’ll add here the disclaimer that any opinion, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in the sessions were those of the participating authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.

Bearing in mind the symposium presenters were globally dispersed rather than all being physically present in Buffalo (USA) where the ISLS conference was happening, Michael created this Padlet as a way of bringing together the different contributions to the symposium, and as a way of stimulating and collecting discussion. Well worth a look, and you can also add your own thoughts to the existing work on the Padlet board.

For this event in February, I was joined by Professor Petar Jandrić, Dr David Overend, Dr Jack Reed and Dr Maureen Finn. We delivered the event in hybrid mode, with 45 people present in the physical space of the Edinburgh Futures Institute, with another 110 attending online. As I noted in my opening words, this enabled us to reach a truly global class of teachers, technologists, researchers, students and other people with an interest in the relationship between learning spaces and digital technologies. 

You can watch a recording of the session here (and with thanks to Claire Sowton for making the recording available and supporting the event more generally).

David talked about learning in the postdigital city, Maureen discussed her research around the digital practices and spaces of primary school traveller children, Jack made the case for postdigital outdoor education, and I explored some of the central assumptions of postdigital thinking through the example of the undergraduate architecture studio. In doing this, I looked back at some of the work from my PhD, including the idea that there was promise in bringing a postdigital sensibility to the study of learning spaces. I went on to pursue that idea through a Special Issue (Lamb, Carvalho, Gallagher and Knox 2022), which has in turn sparked lots more interesting work over the last couple of years (most recently evidenced through this Call for Papers around 'The Postdigital Classroom'). And if all goes to plan, by the end of this summer my edited collection with Lucila Carvalho - 'Postdigital Learning Spaces: Towards Convivial, Equitable and Sustainable Spaces for Learning' (Springer Nature) will be available.

Travelling by train back to Edinburgh, having spent the last couple of days in Winterthur, Switzerland. I was there to deliver a keynote at eduhub days 2024: Redefining Learning Spaces One innovation at a Time. This is the annual conference dedicated to e-learning, teaching, technology, and didactics within Swiss Higher Education Institutions. It is supported by Switch, and this year included, a 'walk-and-talk' exercise, a marketplace of ideas, a student challenge that involved a day-and-a-half spent designing a positive learning space for the future, and lots of space for conversation. The perfect conference if, like me, you're interested in the relationship between learning spaces and digital technologies. 

There were also two key notes presentations: my own to open the conference, and then at the beginning of the second day where Rosan Bosch spoke about her work designing playful learning spaces for schools and universities across the world. I was happy with how my own talk went, but also glad that I preceded, rather than followed, Rosan's impressive contribution.

For my part, I based my keynote around a series of propositions for the design of positive, postdigital spaces of learning:

The visit also gave me a chance to catch up 'in-person' with colleagues I have been working with since visiting Switzerland almost exactly a year ago for another spaces-themed conference. I spent time with Henrietta Carbonnel and her team at UniDistance Suisse who I am working with on a learning design matrix (Matrice de qualité des espaces d'enseignement et d'apprentissage), and Maud Aspart from Université de Lausanne who I am collaborating with on some educational video materials.
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I was also very glad to spend time exchanging ideas and experiences with Jacky Maatman (Fernfachhochschule Schweiz), Miriam Fischer (ZHAW Zurich) and Fenja Talirz (ZHAW Zurich) who I have been fortunate to teach while they have been studying the MSc Digital Education or MSc Education Futures here at Edinburgh University.

Travelling back to Edinburgh from Dublin (taxi-ferry-trains-bus), where I yesterday delivered a keynote presentation as part of the conference, Sustainable Hybrid Education: Building a Community of Practice to Rise to the Needs of the Future. It was part of the Erasmus+ Hybrid-e project, which is funded jointly by the University of Amsterdam, Aristotle University Thessaloniki, KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and the Teaching and Learning Unit at University College Dublin. The conference was organised David Jennings and Eoin McEvoy, who put together an event that really successfully brought together colleagues from a range of institutions and disciplines, and working in different roles.

The title of my presentation was ‘Choreography and improvisation in hybrid higher education’, which is something I’ve been thinking about for a while, and am currently writing-up with Tim Fawns, Joe Noteboom, and Jen Ross, based upon our experiences of teaching fusion courses within the MSc in Education Futures.

Here's a recording of my presentation on YouTube.
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And these are my slides and references:

My talk was collected around the following propositions, which draw on my teaching and research around hybrid education:

• The possibilities of fusion teaching are never simply a matter of what digital resources can bring to the combined physical and digital classroom. It is more productive, we have argued, to recognise fusion education as a choreography of space, time, technology and pedagogy.
• This is a choreography that extends beyond the conventional interest in human bodies and interests, to also consider the wider social and material actors that shape educational activities.
• Conceptualising fusion education as choreography is also in step with the idea of teaching as performance, which opens the way to recognising its unpredictable and contingent nature.
• Our ability to choreograph and then improvise becomes easier at the point that we recognise fusion to be more than a series of processes and activities, but also a way of thinking about education

On this final idea, I proposed that the design of successful hybrid (or ‘fusion’ as we prefer to describe our approach within the Edinburgh Futures Institute) education benefits from a particular mindset, which can be described as follows:

• Designing courses and activities from a fusion-first position, rather than creating an ‘online version’ or ‘delivering classroom teaching digitally’.
• Joining up, and seeking out the potentialities, of the different modes of engagement. What can asynchronicity, or a more diverse cohort, bring to conversation and learning?
• Recognising that while ‘online’ and ‘on site’ are administratively convenient, they describe a mode of attendance rather than a type of student. An ‘on site’ student is also an online learner.
• Thinking about how our language reveals and enacts assumptions about pedagogy. ‘Attendance’, ‘arriving in class’, ‘being present’, ‘eye contact’, ‘campus’ also apply, albeit differently, online

What I also argued in my keynote was that all of the above is helped by seeking out the expertise and expectations of different stakeholders within teaching in learning. When hybrid education (and all education really), is never a straight exchange between student-and-teacher, and certainly never just about the tech, there is value in bringing together learning designers, technologists, AV specialists, academics, learners and other groups besides.

In this chapter I explore the conceptual compatibility of sociomateriality and postdigital thinking, explored through higher education learning spaces research. I make three arguments in the chapter, as follows.

To begin, sociomateriality and postdigital thinking have a good deal of conceptual common ground.

However, while sociomateriality provides a very helpful openness to all the different human and non-human bodies that shape educational practices and spaces, postdigital thinking more forcefully pushes us to recognise and reckon with the presence and influence of digital technologies and practices in particular.

In fact, postdigital thinking, I suggest, works as a kind of research sensibility, as it shapes how we see and understand our educational surroundings.

My chapter is part of this collection concerned with Constructing Postdigital Research, edited by Petar Jandrić. Alison MacKenzie and Jeremy Knox.


Lamb, J. (2023). Sociomateriality, Postdigital Thinking, and Learning Spaces Research. In: Jandrić, P., MacKenzie, A., Knox, J. (eds) Constructing Postdigital Research . Postdigital Science and Education . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35411-3_6

Along with my colleagues, Sian Bayne and Emma McAllister, and former colleague Martin Hawksey, I guested on the Teaching Here and There podcast. The podcast series is organised and hosted by Dominic Pates and colleagues at City University, with many of the conversations taking a particular interest in the relationship between digital technologies and education. The subject of this episode was the development of fusion education within our Edinburgh Futures Institute. Listen below or here. 

​Since 2015, I’ve been doing work around the ways that digital technologies shape how we document, experience and understand the city. This has included staging events with my colleagues Michael Gallagher and Jeremy Knox, which includes excursions and seminars in Amsterdam, Bremen and London. Last week I travelled to Braunschweig in northern Germany, where I presented a paper, ‘The Augmented reality of the postdigital city’. This was part of Participation and the Postdigital: Contemporary technologies and practices in education and urban life.
 
One of the points I made during my presentation was that, in the earlier excursions in Amsterdam, Bremen and London, there was something novel about the way that Michael, Jeremy and I had used digital technologies (variously including mobile phones, the Telegram messaging app and other resources) as a way of documenting or helping to navigate the city. However, in the reasonably short time since our earliest activities, these and other digital technologies have become so commonplace in our everyday surroundings and actions to no longer be remarkable. Or to put it another way, we occupy a postdigital city.
 
As I discussed in my paper, when we nowadays cut a path through the city, we readily and seamlessly augment our aural, visual and wider sensorial and emotional relationship with the city through digital materials and practices. Within the postdigital urban condition we use QR codes to access information. Streamed playlists and podcasts provide an alternative soundtrack to our surroundings. We purchase goods through contact-less connections. And at the same these interactions enable the tracking of our movements and the documenting of our habits and preferences.