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
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I am a Lecturer in Digital Education (Education Futures), within the Centre for Research in Digital Education at The University of Edinburgh.
@james858499 [email protected] |