A Trace in Splace
Footprint: Visitor vs Resident
One member of our team wrote about the fear of creating a digital footprint, as a factor in 'Blog Hesitancy'.
Many of us - me included - are hesitant to share our thoughts and lives with the world. That may be OK for teenagers on Instagram, but I am happy without followers, likes, and online love. I do not want to be an influencer. I don't like the idea of being pursued online by employers, ex-colleagues, my students. The digital footprint is permanent - there is no 'right to be forgotten.'
Recently, however, I have begun to think again about the footprint. Working with students in online spaces during lockdown, I was rarely motivated or excited to enter the virtual classroom. As a college lecturer I look forward to teaching the physical class, but during the online teaching epoch I never thought 'I wonder what's happening in our MS Teams site.' That site...the untidy sequence of text boxes down the page. The webcam. The flat people. The chat box. Surely we can do better than this.
The history of online spaces - time and space make a splace
Perhaps we can and should leave a footprint in our online learning environments. Something should persist, between visits and encounters. The space should have a history, that reflects its use by the visitors. The visitors should be able to 'conform' the space - not just by adding comments in the chat, but by bringing their own priorities and changing the use of the space.
We see something about evolving or emerging spaces in platforms like Gather. Personally, I do not like the appearance of Gather, with its avatars that remind me of a cheap video game. But the idea of customising the space, and personalising your encounters with other people in the space, is a good one. In Gather, you can 'approach' another person for a private conversation, or you can enter sub-rooms inside the space, with dedicated functions. The users can build or decorate their own rooms, and upload apps and features in those rooms. This space develops in time, and the users can create new zones and functions within it.
There are rival platforms to Gather, including some with more realistic avatars or figures, and even some with a sense of 'optic flow' as you walk along the corridors. I do not expect an online learning environment to look like a 3D world, but I would like a sense that the community finds new ways of occupying the space. In these worlds, the visitors can leave a footprint - and they can erase their footprint. Or, if some functions of the space have a 'recommender' system (like online shopping sites), the footprints might fade after time, as they are used less frequently. This comes closer to the idea of a real space, where the use of the space makes new routes and new customs. 'We all want to get off the bus HERE...so let's have a bus stop.' 'We all crash if we turn left HERE...so let's have a rule about traffic priority.' 'We all take a short cut through this field...and now there's a footpath.'
Affordance - permissions in splace
For a space to work this way, it must be designed to interact with its users. I cannot re-design this blog page unless I know how. The features of a space that 'invite' us to use them are called Affordances. The term was introduced by James J Gibson, who in 1979 wrote a classic of psycho-geography called The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. A whiteboard is an affordance of a classroom. So are the chairs. In an online space, where the visitors all need a visa to become residents, we are less reluctant to express ourselves, because there is a boundary around the space. When we learn online, what affordances do we want? More than a webcam and a chat box! How can these affordances permit new traces to appear, and then to fade? What kind of ecology happens in this space? This is the kind of Footprint I think we could all learn to live with.