Place-Based Spaces for Networked Learning

Lucila Carvalho, Peter Goodyear, Maarten de Laat

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317531081
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

With the boundaries of place softened and extended by digital communications technologies, learning in a networked society necessitates new distributions of activity across time, space, media, and people; and this development is no longer exclusive to formally designated spaces such as school classrooms, lecture halls, or research laboratories. Place-based Spaces for Networked Learning explores how qualities of physical places make both formal and informal education in a networked society possible. Through a series of investigations and case studies, it illuminates the structural composition and functioning of complex learning environments.

This book offers a wealth of key design elements and attributes for productive learning that educational designers can reuse in multiple contexts. The chapters examine how places are modified, expanded, or supplemented by networking technologies and practices in order to create spaces in which learners can collaboratively develop new understandings, connections, and capabilities. Utilizing a range of diverse but complementary perspectives from anthropology, archaeology, architecture, geography, psychology, sociology, and urban studies, Place-based Spaces for Networked Learning addresses how material places and digital spaces are understood; how sense can be made of new assemblages and configurations of tasks, tools, and people; how the real-time analysis of new flows of data can inform and entertain users of a space; and how access to the digital realm changes our experiences with both places and other people.

1 Place, Space, and Networked Learning

Lucila Carvalho, Peter Goodyear and Maarten de Laat

DOI: 10.4324/9781315724485-1

Learning in a networked society involves new distributions of activity across time, space, media, organizations, and people. Learning is not restricted to specific places. It spills across the boundaries of formally designated sites for learning—like classrooms and lecture halls. It can occur anywhere. Indeed, the growing scale and variety of uses of mobile, personal, connected technologies raise questions about the nature of place. “Where?” is no longer a simple question.

Learning is not coterminous with education. It is much more pervasive than that. People sharpen their skills, have new insights, and achieve deeper understandings of themselves and the world—people learn—whether or not they are in the role of “student.” People help others learn, without having to be called “teacher.” Learning can be intentional or it can be incidental—a by-product of some other activity. Complex learning is often a mixture of the intentional and incidental. Some kinds of learning benefit from conscious self-management, using processes like self-monitoring, repetition, and reflection. But learning can also go unnoticed—human beings have evolved to be very good at learning through observing and copying others, for example, and can do this without being aware of the fact. Learning is woven through the fabric of our daily lives.

This sense of learning being almost ubiquitous has parallels in how people use and experience space (Relph 1976; Tuan 1977; Urry 2002; Massey 2005; Boys 2011, 2015;). Imagination and memory have long allowed us to live in ways that are not completely bound to the here and now. Personal, mobile, digital devices are being used in ways that further soften the boundaries of place. They provide access to much wider sets of resources and people. Their use creates and modulates connections: between people, things, ideas, and experiences. One way to think about, analyze, and understand these connections is in terms of networks—whether networks of people, or more heterogeneous networks of people and things (Hodgson et al. 2014; Jones 2015). Such networks can have many functions. We are particularly interested in relations between networks and learning, broadly defined. Networks are assembled in learning, and learning is shaped by existing networks. So the properties of networks are consequential with respect to learning, and are worth researching, even though they also change. We use the term “learning networks” to denote networks in which learning is a significant activity. It is a large, well-populated category, given what we said earlier about the ubiquity of learning.

In a recent book—The Architecture of Productive Learning Networks (APLN) (Carvalho and Goodyear 2014)—we presented a method for analyzing the key components of learning networks, illustrated with a dozen case studies. A distinguishing feature of the APLN book was that many of the case studies traced participants’ learning experiences outwards, from the (digital) network into the material world—into the everyday contexts of life and work. This book—Place-Based Spaces for Networked Learning (PBSNL)—examines the flip side: it starts with places and traces activity outwards into the digital networks that extend each place. In so doing, we look at how spaces are created for networked learning, and we also challenge the assumption that the “digital” and the “material”—or the “virtual” and the “actual”—are easy to separate, or in fact need to be.

Places Extended by Networked Technologies

The phenomena in which we are interested include the use of networked digital devices to extend the experience of visitors to museums, art galleries, and historical sites (Giaccardi 2012; Jewitt 2012). These uses can be quite simple—the addition of audio information about a painting, or its painter, for instance. They can be more complex—allowing museum visitors to record their own thoughts and feelings and share them with unknown future visitors. Technology use can be formally organized—as when gallery or museum staff create and maintain the network infrastructure and its informational resources. Or it may emerge from the spontaneous activity of visitors to, or inhabitants of, a place—for example, when they make and share images and comments over social media.

Places for formal education, like schools and university campuses, are also being extended with network technologies—both institutionally provided and personally owned (Boys 2011, 2015). Many educational institutions have introduced a “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) policy, for example: encouraging students to take responsibility for their own learning tools, and transferring costs to them at the same time. As a consequence, student-owned, networked digital devices are now commonplace in many classrooms and lecture halls—bringing with them almost infinite opportunities for enrichment and distraction. Educational architectures are changing to accommodate the use of new technologies (Taylor 2009; Boys 2011, 2015). At a micro level, this may be as simple as providing more power points for charging batteries. At a meso level, we see new kinds of buildings emerging: new “learning commons,” “learning hubs,” and reconfigured libraries.

The contributions to this book take place as their starting point. In various ways, they examine places as modified (extended, expanded, supplemented, colored) by network technologies and networking practices. They help us see how places, thus extended, contribute to the creation of spaces in which people can collaboratively come to new understandings and/or develop new capabilities.

The technologies involved in networked activity are changing very fast. New consumer devices, media habits, and social networking practices are emerging. As these become more mainstream, they can also become less visible—more taken-for-granted than scrutinized. So the chapters in this volume offer a timely opportunity to examine how the material and the digital, places and spaces are understood; how sense can be made of new assemblages and configurations of tasks, tools, and people; how the real-time analysis of new flows of data can inform and entertain users of a space; how the opening-up of access to the digital realm, anywhere and everywhere, 24/7, changes the experience of being in a place, of a place’s constraints and affordances, and of being with other people.

Some of the chapters in the book are rooted in the authors’ analyses of specific places. Others show how theoretical ideas from a range of disciplines can be integrated to shed new light on place, space, networks, learning, and other human activities. The relations between human activity, thought, experience, and emotion (on the one hand) and place and technology (on the other) have been objects of attention for many disciplines. Fields such as anthropology, archeology, psychology, sociology, semiotics, geography, architecture, and urban studies have, over the years, had something to say about people’s experiences of place, the uses of space, and the mutual shaping of human thought and technology, within them. In Place-Based Spaces for Networked Learning we bring some of these diverse but complementary perspectives together, as a way of understanding the structural composition of complex environments in which people learn. In so doing, we hope to contribute to a more comprehensive picture of architectures for networked learning.

Analysis to Inform Design

Our main concern is to explore ideas that can be reused. We think of this quite concretely. For ideas to be candidates for reuse, there have to be real people and real work processes in which they can be useful. “Actionable knowledge”—knowledge that can play a significant role in guiding action in the world—only has this status by virtue of a relationship between the knowledge and the needs, actions, and capabilities of its users. We employ the general term “designers” for the users we have in mind: people who work together to elucidate complex problems and propose actions—people whose work results in suggestions for what it might be good to do, to make, to build, or to reconfigure and whose suggestions are usually informed by experience, trial and error, and a relentless testing of assumptions about what is really needed. Design often progresses through reframing the apparent problem, not by advancing neat solutions to the problem as posed.

Thus, when we search for the influence of the qualities of place on activity, we do so with a view to extracting and conceptualizing the role of key design elements in networks. We search for elements that work in a particular context, and seek to understand and explain how they might also be useful in other learning settings. We are interested in identifying key attributes and studying their role in characterizing productive learning in physically situated networks, exploring what connects people in certain locations, and which tools and technologies they use when thus connected.

We also reach out to incorporate understandings from fields that have, for a number of years, been dealing with people’s perceptions and experiences of places, as a way of enriching the pool of ideas that may be of use to designers who are working to help other people learn. We are convinced that designers have much to gain from drawing on ideas that explore the material and the digital, intentional and incidental, learning places and networks, in formally defined and informal learning places—schools, universities, research labs, museums, galleries, city streets, parks, and hiking trails, to name a few.

The ACAD Framework

In The Architecture of Productive Learning Networks (Carvalho and Goodyear 2014) we described an architecturally inspired framework for design and analysis: for explaining how various structural elements come together in complex learning situations. We call this the Activity-Centred Analysis and Design (ACAD) framework. The key principles motivating ACAD are that in order to understand learning (and in order to successfully design for learning) we must: (i) pay close attention to human activity: to what people actually do—mentally, physically, emotionally, perceptually; and (ii) examine the relations between this activity and the structures within which it emerges. The ACAD framework draws attention to three main kinds of structures—physical, social, and epistemic/intentional. Design work—undertaken prior to the times in which people are acting and learning—can focus on physical, social, and epistemic/intentional design components. In APLN, to be concise, we labeled these set design, social design, and epistemic design. The fourth element in the framework is not designable—this is the actual activity in which people engage: activity in and through which they co-create knowledge and co-configure their learning environment and their working relationships (divisions of labor, etc.). This insistence on separating what designers can actually design from what people actually do in their subsequent (learning) activity allows conceptual space for these people’s agency—in reshaping and reconfiguring what has been designed.

Take an example from design in university education. When analyzing or designing for learning, educational designers will usually consider digital and material elements that come to hand, such as the tools and resources students will access, the arrangement of furniture in a classroom, or the layout of an online learning platform. These types of elements are referred to as components in the “set design” for a particular learning situation. The second designable component concerns social arrangements. It relates to social structures, roles, divisions of labor, etc. It concerns such things as whether educational designers have plans for how learners will be organized: in pairs, groups, the use of scripted roles, etc. In the ACAD framework such structures form part of the “social design.” Last but not least, there will normally also be some planning of the tasks students will be asked to undertake. Task design is normally informed by ideas about the nature, form, and structure of knowledge, appropriate sequencing and pacing, relations between different kinds of knowledge and different ways of learning, etc. So we refer to this—in formal educational situations, or more broadly where intentional learning is expected—as “epistemic design.”

In the actual flux of real-world activity—in what people are actually doing—the epistemic, social, and set become entangled. This is partly because what is designed does not determine activity. For example, students’ interpretive work, their improvisation, and their exercise of agency soften and problematize the connections between designers’ intentions, student activity, and outcomes. The affordances of the tools they select, or the place in whi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Place, Space, and Networked Learning
• 2 Placing Focus in the Place-Based Spaces for Networked Learning
• 3 Educational Design and Birds on Trees
• 4 A Study of Correspondence, Dissonance, and Improvisation in the Design and Use of a School-Based Networked Learning Environment
• 5 Finding The Spaces In-Between: Learning as a Social Material Practice
• 6 Students’ Physical and Digital Sites of Study: Making, Marking, and Breaking Boundaries
• 7 The Sonic Spaces of Online Distance Learners
• 8 Is There Anybody Out There? Place-Based Networks for Learning: NetMap—a Tool for Accessing Hidden Informal Learning Networks
• 9 Networked Places as Communicative Resources: A Social-Semiotic Analysis of a Redesigned University Library
• 10 Building Bridges: Design, Emotion, and Museum Learning
• 11 The O in MONA: Reshaping Museum Space
• 12 Practicalities of Developing and Deploying a Handheld Multimedia Guide for Museum Visitors
• 13 Citizen Cartographer
• 14 Designing Hubs for Connected Learning: Social, Spatial, and Technological Insights from Coworking Spaces, Hackerspaces, and Meetup Groups
• 15 Spaces Enabling Change: X-Lab and Science Education 2020
• 16 Translating Translational Research on Space Design from the Health Sector to Higher Education: Lessons Learnt and Challenges Revealed
• 17 Conclusion—Place-Based Spaces for Networked Learning: Emerging Themes and Issues
• Author Biographies
• Index