(Im)mobilities and (dis)locating practices in cyber education

Richard EdwardsThe Stirling Institute of Education

University of Stirling

‘The discourse of geography has become much wider than the discipline.’ (Gregory 1994: 81)

Static space

Relational spaces

New mobilities

‘…if you click on a bubble or a little image… wooosh! You can move into sort of a parallel universe of electronic hyperspace.’ Lecturer

‘Space is not static (i.e. time-less), nor time spaceless…spatiality and temporality are different from each other but neither can be conceptualised as the absence of the other’. Massey (1993: 155)

Spatial theories

• Political economy• Feminist• Post-structuralist• Materialist

Technologies

• Space-time compression• Speed• Interweaving of spatialities and temporalities• Dwelling and reflection• Mobility and connecting

Place and movement• Location, immobility, place, bounded, authentic,

face-to-face, parochial

• Dislocation, mobility, nomadism, relational, superficial, mediated, cosmopolitanism

• (Im)mobilities are ‘hybrid systems, “materialities and mobilities” that combine objects, technologies, socialities and affects out of which distinct places are produced and reproduced’ (Hannam et al. 2006: 14).

Spatial binaries in cyber education

• virtual-real spaces • immaterial-material spaces • cyber-physical spaces

Cyber case-based learning

Taking students ‘out of their comfort zone’. Lecturer

‘You see how everything is fitting together’. Student

Cases as bounded or expanding universes

Wikis

Containers or Networked Relations?

Moorings

‘Bounding this activity by being a biologist.’ Lecturer

CONTEXT Container Community Network

FOCUS Individual Social Material

METAPHOROF LEARNING

Acquisition Participation (Im)mobilities

MOBILISING RESOURCES

Transfer Border Crossing

Boundary Marking

PEDAGOGIC ASSUMPTION

Technical Fix Humanrelations

Human and non-human assemblages