I would like to invite you all – current students, alumni and all programme team members – to participate in a small exercise to map the distribution of participants in the eLearning programme. This is part of an ongoing interest that Jen Ross and I have in what one might call “the spirit of place” in online distance learning.
I have set up an editable Google Map instance into which I would like people – participants in the programme from all over the world – to enter information about where they are, and about their own, local, familiar environment. You probably don’t want to geotag your exact home address, for obvious reasons, but perhaps the district in which you live and / or work, the cafés that you frequent, the bus-stop where you begin the homeward commute, and so on. Some of us have started the ball rolling by adding some links around the School of Education campus in central Edinburgh, to give a feeling of what one might do.
The map will be publicly viewable, but editing access will be by invitation only. So can I ask those of you who want to participate – all of you – to email me (H.A.Macleod@ed.ac.uk) with an email address associated with your Google account, and I will send you an invitation. Once we see how this goes, I will ask Jen to link the map from the Hub main page.
I would be keen to hear from those who know about interactive mapping and who have suggestions about other things that we might do – real-time geotagging from our mobile phones perhaps. 🙂
Please join in.
This sounds great. I always remember the poet William Carlos Williams said (check the quote) “there are no ideas but in things,” but in this case the ideas could be seen to be embedded in places embedded in virtual maps. The geographic and urban mnemonics in an MScEL cyber diaspora.
Have you seen the iPhone app “PlaceWhisper” Dennis?
I’m not finding it listed at the AppStore–Could it be a UK only App do you think?
Looking good already folks – many thanks.
Good idea to add not only current locations, but also other places salient to the individual.