v&r mapping

Thom Cochrane shared in #EDUC90970 “In response to the critique of the Digital Native narrative popularised by Prensky, David White proposed the “Visitors and Residents” (VandR) framework of technology adoption. JISC subsequently utilised the VandR mapping exercise within their Digital Literacies framework and guides. The VandR mapping exercise provides a quick visual map of how students and academics interact with various technologies in the Institutional (or Professional) and Personal (or Social) domains. It also highlights the potential for rethinking how various tools can be used within a more professional domain rather than merely within a social or personal domain.”

I created a digital version in this mapping tool. A fascinating exercise, which had me thinking visually about my use of digital tools across my professional and personal life. I used different colours to group the way I used the various tools (storage for T&L, teaching/presenting, investigation (personal or professional, etc etc) and size to represent how much of my digital activity was conducted through each platform/tool. It was actually quite profound, not only the number of tools, but how they clustered so heavily in my professional life; how some overlapped suggesting I could simplify into a single platform for less ‘cognitive overload’; how sometimes the replications were a result of institutional mandates on what platforms to use, and sometimes were just ongoing redundancy of tools, with new platforms doing things better…but you still had hangovers from old tools ( for me Endnote to Mendeley over a more than a decade).

Infuriatingly, the platform timed out while I did other tasks (the email pile up etc) and I didn’t know and kept adding content, so when it came time to save and share… the whole thing disappeared into digital dust. Aaaarghhhhhhhhh. A lesson there…

So, I went to my old fallback, coloured markers on a large piece of paper, and whipped out a messy analogue version, which is what you see below.

Messy analogue version of a much more complex digital map, that disappeared in a poof of digital smoke when I tried to save it…

online exhibitions for VIRTUAL tertiary seminar in health

Through 2020 COVID challenges I added a number of new online exhibitions for the Grainger Museum, to support virtual delivery of object-based learning sessions. Originally set up to enhance public engagement with new exhibitions curated in the Grainger Museum, the virtual exhibitions in the Omeka platform hosted on the Grainger Museum website proved to be invaluable in the new virtual teaching space we were all forced to occupy last year. The new Making the Museum virtual exhibit allowed students to engage with the history and collections and themes of the museums in a very interactive way: I would send students off into breakout rooms in Zoom to virtually explore particular elements of the exhibit, and then they would share their observations and discussions back in the main group… just like in a physical interaction in the Museum. This worked beautifully for a variety of disciplinary areas, from architecture and design, to art curatorship, to musicology and education, and more.

For a postgraduate Clinical Education in Practice subject, the academic Jayne Lysk and I shaped up an even more hands on approach for the students. Using a Personal Responses Tour pedagogy we utilised a set of ‘questions’ the groups of students would address in each virtual breakout group. Student were then asked to post an individually selected image from one of the online exhibitions to a pre-prepared Padlet page (one for each group), write their personal response in the Padlet comments for their selected virtual ‘museum object’ and then discuss in their group. I then pulled each post across into a group Padlet which I screen-shared to the whole group for a summary discussion. This had the added value of concatenating everyone’s observations, allowing us to move into the transformation phase of the excercise, usually achieved in the museum as a final group discussion that related the content directly back to the core themes : observation, ethics, health contexts, diversity and empathy, etc.

Snapshot of Padlet page for gathered group posts

I have just updated the Padlets from 2020, for our 2021 Semester 1 iteration, removing all but one (anonymous) post from each group padlet but re-using the url to save prep time. The anonymous post from 2020 will kick start the activity even more effectively than last year. My final step is to check the ‘Padlet how to’ video I made and posted on the LMS last year, just to make sure it still did the job (and to see how much more grey my hair has got in the last 12 months 🙂 )

Clinical Teaching in Practice professionals in the Grainger Museum in an object based learning seminar

kicking off the edublog

This blog kicks off my Edublog site, and is a work in progress for upskilling in a new program and getting some content in there at the same time. I intend this Edublog to focus on my passion for museum-based learning in tertiary contexts across disciplines, which underpins my role at the University of Melbourne as Senior Academic Programs Curator in the Museums and Collections Department.

This is a picture of Interactive Composition students having a seminar in the Grainger Museum, learning hands on skills of sampling historic and unique instruments from the Collection. They later created new compositions with the samples: https://soundcloud.com/user-839269279/sets/living-instruments-creative-sound-works
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