I was a bit inspired by Hamish’s recent post about using Google Maps to track physical locations, both current, past, and important. It is a great idea and I love to see these types of constructs form as it helps me visualize my connections to the University of Edinburgh all the more. With a little encouragement from Hamish, I decided to post here to see if anyone was as interested as I am in where we connect to the University of Edinburgh, as in our interface to this digital culture.
Would you like to share an image of where you interface with Edinburgh? My idea here is to gather representations of where we interface with the University of Edinburgh. I am not sure we can divorce the physical elements of our engagement with the University of Edinburgh (nor would we want to) as the physical elements provide quite a bit of context, revealing quite a bit about this fairly sturdy community of inquiry.
So, to get to the point, where do you interface with Edinburgh? Where is your workstation? What equipment do you use? Are you sitting upright (I am certainly not)? These questions intrigue me as they speak quite a bit to what it means to associate with a university online. I am incredibly proud of my participation with this crowd, as an active member of the University. However, I have never been to Scotland or Edinburgh. I have only seen the University in pictures. Yet, I am a member of it, part of the community.

If interested, perhaps we could post them to the Google Map that Hamish initiated. When dropping a location on the Google Map, click Rich Text and then the image icon to drop an image into the placemark. This is just an attempt to see how people engage physically with the programme. For those of us far away (physically) from Edinburgh, it is a furthering of our social community.
Nice one Michael The difficulty is going to be in choosing just one image…
great idea, Michael – there’s an Australian researcher who does work in this area – Reem Al-Mahmood. She says, among other things “Our universities are being reconfigured and are configuring of us in who we become and how we teach as online educators in the new spaces/places of the digital academy.”
Al-Mahmood, R. (2008). Spatialities and online teaching: To, from and beyond the academy. Asciilite 2008, Melbourne, p.11-22. http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/melbourne08/procs/al-mahmood.pdf
Love the idea, Michael! Hmmm…might have to tidy my space up a bit before I take a pic though. 😛
Thanks for the enthusiasm all (and the article, Jen). Choosing just one is difficult, Sian, as we interface in so many different places and levels of formality (work vs. home vs. airport vs. hotel) and I wonder if that influences our input/engagement with the course.
Tidying up was a concern of mine as well. The picture I posted was a view from the sofa, not the sofa itself. For very much the same reason!
Hello Michael. I couldn’t capture my space in a single image. I think I’d need a Matrix-esque light-bending camera to photograph my L-shaped room. And the shops are shut.
Instead…
http://edc.education.ed.ac.uk/jamesl/2010/10/09/welcome-to-my-transliterate-world/
I like the idea of this!
I am mostly at edinburgh from my living room or my bedroom:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/marielikespavement/tags/ededc/