presented by Ed Chang and Jentery Sayers, 10+31+2007

for research exposed! (general studies 391) at the UW

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Example 2: "Geolocation! (Or Undergraduates Compose a Virtual UW Campus)" >> by Jentery

This past summer, in an English 131 composition course, undergraduates and I composed a "virtual" version of the UW campus using Google maps, geoblogging, and multimedia.

Related to technoliteracy, the idea here was not only to go around and "capture" the UW campus from multiple angles and "street level" perspectives, but to also:

• Use technology for collaborative purposes,
• "Mobilize" the classroom and extend it beyond our small room in the social work building,
• Actually construct a virtual space, rather than merely "reading" and critiquing an existing one,
• Create an imaginative, virtual space through technologies (e.g., mobile phones, digital cameras, microphones, blogging, and computers) that -- to borrow from the parlance of this course -- "exposed" how we use, understand, and respond to technologies and media differently, and
• Explore, document, and archive how the uses of technologies and campus spaces intersect with the production and circulation of socio-cultural norms, such as "men know more about technologies" and "everyone on campus has equal access to campus spaces and resources."

Our hopes, then, were to become more than "users" of the campus or "users" of technologies. Instead, through the collaborative composition of a virtual UW campus, we wanted to critically engage and become better aware of how the campus and technologies function, how they influence people differently, and the politics of representation that emerge from them.

Here's our map:

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