ou will all be notified presently and on that note uh welcome everyone to the first of a series of webinars that are being presented by the design and development division of aect my name is matthew schmidt i'm currently the president of the design and development division and this series of webinars will be taking place once a month from now until the convention in october so you can expect some very exciting speakers and some exciting topics and the first topic that we have starting things off we might as well start off with a bang sanya tavari or i should say doctor sanjiatovari who is going to be presenting learning environment visual mapping in learning experience design so i'm looking forward to your presentation today and i will pass the microphone to you hey everyone thanks for coming in today so i presented this at act a few years ago and so this presentation is sort of a follow-up and an update hopefully you can use it and apply it to your own research or any other work so what are uh learning environment visual maps it's it's just a method of analyzing the complete picture where do students learn overall because generally we just focus on one setting like in the classroom or at home because our research kind of focuses on one part of the learning experience and visual mapping kind of helps us combine all of the learning that takes place in someone's life and then create a map so a one-page kind of summary of a view of someone's learning environment so why do we need to have a holistic view of learning environments is because whatever we learn in one environment we kind of carry that learning into other aspects of our life and um sawyer had a very nice definition of a learning environment in the cambridge handbook of learning sciences which was that a learning environment consists of the people the technology the architecture or like the physical space of a learning environment and the social cultural factors that are in play within that environment so we we can't just say that my learning environment is the classroom it is a say a public school classroom in a rural location with a majority minorities that's like a more descriptive view of the learning environment or that these classrooms do have uh just like one ipad that is being shared with all of the students so the the presence of technology but to what extent those are the kind of details that paint a better picture of a learning environment so um yeah so why use visual mapping it has already been used as a research methodology it is very popular in ethnography and luna hernandez she uses you know participant generated photos to map out their learning environment or kimberly powell she uses mapping to understand relation between the the aspects that you were talking about earlier you know the places people's lived experiences their communities so mapping has been used before uh the spin on on that uh with the research that i did with my friend yujin chu uh was that uh we create a visual map which is the summary of what we are doing in different parts of our lives there are questionnaires where we ask teachers and parents to share because children may not themselves express very accurately what kind of learning environments they have so for children we also added questionnaires uh that we need to ask the teachers and parents to get more information and then an analysis map and it will all start making sense as we see the example so this is a template for the visual map we hand it out to children in a classroom or after school uh activity and we basically ask them to draw the the people the technologies whatever learning activities you do in a setting and what does that space look like just like draw sketches so for example this is one of the drawings that we get back and we ask them to also write keywords because you know sometimes drawings may not make sense so we also ask them to write what it is so for example this child has drawn you know a chromebook uh some i guess like watching discovery channel on tv or con kids on ipad uh they've drawn their their pet their sibling i guess or a mom reading that time story so we get all this kind of information from children and it helps to have this visual map instead of just the interview or just like a questionnaire because it gives them opportunity to open up it's like a low floor entry point for children to start expressing what kind of learning happens in different schools different settings in their life then we also um ask uh teachers some questions it's like general information about the teacher what kind of uh school district or you know public private uh charter school some some basic information about the teacher and uh like the number of years and their experience how long they've been teaching and um then the learning spaces in the classrooms teachers will probably give a more organized answer you know that we have a reading station and we have a play area something like that and then the learning spaces and um i'm so sorry i just realized learning space in other spaces what i meant was in other parts of the school so like the library a maker space or uh another uh like a morning hall that is repurposed as a robotics club meeting area those kind of information is better to receive from the teachers and then there are some questions that we ask the parents the demographic information what kind of learning do children experience at home and in other places like in their neighborhood their grandparents house so like in the drawing we see like you know the natural history museum and uh walking the dog so we we know that the child even outside of the school and home is having other opportunities to learn in other settings and then there's the analysis map so this is for the researcher and this is and in this we fill out what kind of activities are what kind of learning activities are taking place in all these different areas so like you know visual learning activities using pictures images or you know physical or kinesthetic activities like using your whole body and sense of touch and then we basically fill it up here so in the learning column you see what kind of learning activities are taking place and just like the we take the notes by sawyer on people technology architecture culture and then we start filling out the details taking into account uh not only the drawings by the children but all the information that came in from the questionnaires so now we have like one summary view of like one child that what are the opportunities if if we are looking for some you know like some large motor play kind of activities maybe the grandparents house or the neighborhood or community center those are some possible places where we can extend the learning or assign homework or activities that can be done at these other places so it's a nice view to have from the researchers point of view and so the the goal is to create a holistic view directly getting visual maps from children questionnaires from parents and teachers and then the analysis map from the researcher now for adults uh we can directly map out uh things in an interactive map like google my maps or proxy.com you can directly add markers and then start adding a journal a digital journal right there add nodes images videos associated with any of the locations and then the analysis map is very similar you can look at the interactive map and then start mapping out in the analysis now so here's an example um let me stop share and share proxy.com okay so here's a uh i try to go to different maker spaces and i'm trying to use the learning environment visual maps to kind of capture my makerspace experiences in san francisco bay area and so on the left here you can see i've created some categories like sculpture textiles ceramics technology and each of them have an icon like you get to create an icon of each so the cup is a ceramic thing and it tells me if i click on this thumbnail it will tell me oh this is the artbead and what am i trying to do here hand building with clay it gives the address it gives a clickable link like if you do more information it will take you directly to the website of that uh maker space and so this is the way i am sort of keeping a track of all the things that i'm going to do in all these different maker spaces and you can even um just a second back let me show some other so you can even see a whole list of points uh and the the icon for the category so for example and i can also look at all my notes here and so for example the crucible is a makerspace in oakland and i made notes about the kind of things i've been doing there digital fabrication mechanical sculpture and so this is like you know once you have 10 or 12 different maker spaces this is a nice visual map to kind of keep a track of and you can add images videos all these icons were will appear here so everything is organized and you can keep track of that interactive map going back to the presentation so after this i i start collecting pictures from each of the mapping points so if i was doing metal smithing somewhere or raisin casting and i'll just quickly go through these cardboard recycling or you know any of the metal laser cutting all of these things are stuff i made at different maker spaces and i have then taken these images and added to my proxy map so when i write the write and autoethnography this of like my makerspace experiences i have everything organized in like the objects photographed at different stages the notes journal entries about my experiences videos of involving movement and mechanisms otherwise just the photographs are enough and if if anyone's interested park and g had this um article on transitional objects and i i think on the map if you are especially in terms of making or maker spaces if you're building something in stages you can take a picture of the object at different stages and that's what they call the transitional objects and so yeah that that was uh hopefully that gives you an example how to use levm with children and with adults thank you all right lovely thank you sonya short and sweet but certainly to the point um at this point we can open the floor for questions um also feel free to use the chat to add your questions and we'll make sure to address those as we get to them so the floor is open perhaps i can start uh the questions my question has to do with how you have used uh visual mapping in your own design practice so for example um in my own design practice i tend to use mapping uh for front-end analysis and to inform personas and prototypes i'm curious how you use it on your end so for for like the autoethnography project i'm just using is it to organize my data and really um eventually my goal is that once uh i have like bay area has around 50 maker spaces i've only been through like 10 or 12 at this point so my goal is that eventually when i uh go through most of them then i'll also embed this map in a website as a resource for others like what kind of activities i did here or like some tips or start uh crowdsourcing uh information from other makers so it can turn into something but as of now i've just been using it to organize the data for for like the the book chapter that i did where i shared the example from the children's research in that case uh it was also useful as a data collection tool because with with younger children especially in the age group four to eight that i was working with uh with them they don't always verbalize with accuracy they wander off so it was a nice way to kind of keep them focused on the task and it was they opened up more while while drawing different learning activities and settings sonia you've mentioned a couple of times the book chapter that you've reported this in have you provided a link to that or could you provide a link to that in the chat for everyone sure thank you other questions all right sonya i've got a question that has popped up from erica eppler in the chat she asks what ideas do you have for using visual mapping in higher ed or professional development with a follow-up of do you think visual mapping could be appropriate in these situations yeah so like in the the makerspace example that kind of research i've seen a lot and not just with autoethnography i think any research where there are multiple settings and there's a community involved uh it always helps to kind of trace their activities over a geographical area or especially if you're like guterres had this new uh forgot her first name dr gutierrez from uc berkeley she studies horizontal learning and so there has been a lot of research in higher ed that you know generally in in the school or even higher ed system it's vertical learning that we focus on first year second year third year of college and horizontal learning says that whatever you learn within that first year of college you're then applying uh that knowledge into other aspects of your life or developing a new line of research so there's also a lot of horizontal learning and what better way to kind of trace that moving around of knowledge that transfer of knowledge than to map it out how you're learning one thing and then for example a lot of courses at mit are very hands-on and the the projects are rooted in real-world problems so whatever you studied in a class then it's a good way to trace how did you apply it to your own community or a problem that exists in your life thank you sonya we have some more questions coming in um one from dr noah glazer are there any visual mapping tools i.e software that you like to use so uh proxy.com is the one i love those are two female founders from bay area who created that tool and i think it's better than my maps on google because it allows you to you know create categories and pick icons it's just more organized and then it also allows you to embed it in a blog or a website so for public scholarship after your research is done if you want to share some information or share that kind of interactive map or even some journals that now allow embedded data in the digital version of that journal it really helps to i like to use proxy.com great and in terms of the mapping that you did with children you showed some um screenshots of what looks to be paper um right is that is that are those made in for example uh i don't know google slides or something like that yeah it's just uh yeah it's just a very crude template that we used uh i believe it was like the lowest design capability of word microsoft word but yeah i haven't found a a software for that kind of um data collection where like children could upload their pictures and uh stuff like that i'm looking up for the link and i'll just quickly post it i've got the link to proxy if that was what the question was oh okay i'm um i'm looking for the oh i got it a chapter thank you sonya uh another question coming from danilo baylin have you looked at your data using a visual literacy lens no i haven't but it sounds like a good lens to explore all right let's see um coming from shenyu wren uh could you elaborate more on how to analyze visual mapping based on the analysis map okay let me go back here so it is more of like a diagnostic tool for the teachers so uh generally when the teachers are uh giving homeworks or assignment it's something it's it you know ends in a on a paper plane uh this this uh worksheet or workbook or a link to some uh whatever lms the school is using it doesn't generally take into account of the the horizontal learning idea uh from guterres that uh children kind of apply what they learn in school to other settings not just home maybe you know the the children is uh uh has more than one location to go uh it's not just by default just going back home and it could be a daycare it could be another class uh uh it could be the grand parents grandparents home and so when the information is laid out in the analysis map the teacher can look at it and say hmm so there is there are opportunity for some social interactions in locations like the community center or the grandparents house and so the the assignment can then be modified to uh leverage that uh that can you interview an older person and ask them to reflect back on their life or like something about family history or if it's a community center then you know can you identify three or four other cultures that are curious that you're curious to learn about so it just opens up the opportunities to find out what else can our learning be applied to and then even just if you look at the technology you know now this kit in this example has a lot of technology at home chromebook ipad tv learning tablet whatever and you might notice another student has absolutely no technology at home but has access to a chromebook at school so then giving any any kind of especially if the school is not allowing children to take the chromebook back home to assign uh anything that requires a lot of technology it just makes it inequitable so it's a good diagnostic view for the educator to see okay these are the opportunities this is uh somewhat the kind of culture that this child has and maybe uh this is how i can modify um what i'm teaching excellent thank you sonya uh we have another question from tammy huang do you have some data from the learner's perspective of how they feel about the visual mapping approach so for the the children's one i do because um it uh i had the opportunity to record videos and then it was also sort of i didn't completely rely on the maps alone it was more information came in from the questionnaires so in in terms of that the children enjoyed drawing and kind of having a conversation while drawing for the the application in terms of the adults uh the the only project that i'm working on is the autoethnography so i'm the only person there and so i i can't be like 100 unbiased but i find it helpful in organizing the research data it just makes it's kind of an interactive journal for adults because unlike the children where you also have to gather information from two other sources to make sense of it uh in in case of adults you can start uh applying it all of it on your own adding the notes adding the secondary information journaling so for me it's uh it just gave a lot of clarity and made everything more organized and i'm hoping i mean some of you will like try it test it it's a hopefully a conversation and willing to revise and improve the framework excellent uh we do have a comment from how hey in the chat the kind of commenting on this analysis map that you have up here the analysis map on slide 12 is very much like a scene creation table in game development right and and uh luckily like i have been a game designer so i i know absolutely uh what do you mean uh except uh i guess like when we deal with games we're just uh thinking in terms of um also like fictional characters fictional settings props um so yeah but the you're right the way of organizing it is similar good well it looks like we've um gotten to the bottom of the questions and comments in the chat the floor is still open if any of you would like to grab the microphone and ask a live question otherwise i'm still monitoring the chat it looks like people are getting ready to wrap up so why don't we go ahead and do that i'd like to wrap up with a final comment uh that comment has to do with how the work that sonia has presented today fits in with the phenomenon or the concept of learning experience design and the way that i see this fitting in is in an area where we don't have a whole lot of i would say knowledge in the field of instructional design and that is in terms of methods and particularly in terms of methods that are geared towards learning specifically and so i can see that approaches such as visual mapping uh certainly can begin to uh pave the way for further methods in our in in the area of learning experience design that are not necessarily coming from outside of our field but instead are kind of being generated from people who are operating within uh instructional design and learning design so on that note thank you sonya i'm not sure if you had anything you might have wanted to add to that no that's that's it thank you all right wonderful then why don't we call it a moment i'll go ahead and stop the recording i'd like to thank everyone for coming we'll be sending out a recording of this through the aect channels and stay tuned for further developments in the learning experience design webinar series you all have a great rest of your day.