This is a workshop designed to help students reflect on, and visualise, their online activity which is then mapped against the DCAF.
The workshop helps students to identify strengths and weaknesses in their online practices, which provides an opportunity for discussion, support and signposting to associated resources and support such as academic support workshops. Often just providing the scaffolding to have a constructive discussion about digital practices is enough to increase students confidence.
This approach has been piloted with UAL academic support and is likely to become part of their offer. In the meantime, if you are interested in running a session of this kind, do get in touch with David White.
The workshop is based on the ‘Visitors and Residents’ mapping activity. You can find more details in the video below:
After participants have created and discussed their maps they then annotate them with the DCAF, marking which DCAF practices are linked to each area of their map. Given that the DCAF has a strong focus on identity and collaboration much of the mapping will appear on the ‘Resident’ side of participants maps.
The examples below show Visitor and Resident maps which have been annotated with the DCAF using the shorthand letters for each CAF attribute and the corresponding number of the DCAF practice.
In the pilot workshop we then moved onto a cognitive mapping process in which students draw the process they went through when undertaking a recent project and then consider when and how that process intersected with element of their Visitors and Residents map.
The example below shows one student’s research process.