Postcards
As we carried out the first stage of data collection - narrative interviews in the form of 'arrival stories' -interesting pictures began to emerge of participant's study spaces. It became apparent that the MSc in E-Learning 'classroom' was made up of workplaces, cafes, homes, hotel rooms, airports and also periods and places of transit between these different locations. This prompted us to undertake a third stage of data collection, where we hoped to gain insights into the study spaces of distance education students.
Borrowing from the more traditional theme of 'Geographies' we invited participants to submit a digital postcard depicting a place from where they commonly engaged with the MSc in E-Learning. In order to reflect the multimodal nature of the programme, we requested that each postcard should comprise a photograph, a short audio 'field recording', an explanatory message and, of course, the geographical location presented within the visual and aural data. |
Using the data from the 21 digital postcards that were submitted, we created short videos, hosted on a dedicated Vimeo channel. We felt that video was an effective way of representing the aural, visual and textual data.
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Finally, we added the multimodal postcards to interactive class maps (ongoing August 2013). We created a world map (below) and a map of UK participants (right).
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