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Google Mapping the "Last Mile": Youths' Spatial Analysis of Interest-Driven Opportunities

Sat, April 18, 2:45 to 4:15pm, Sheraton, Floor: Ballroom Level, Sheraton V

Abstract

Objectives/purpose
To discuss methodological strategies and challenges (Leander, Phillips, & Taylor, 2010) around tracking, analyzing, and designing supportive learning ecologies, through an examination of Google Maps as an investigative approach to how learning ecologies in the connected learning research network provide support for youths’ interest-driven, post-secondary career development.

Theoretical framework
This study primarily draws on Leander et al.’s three metaphors of learning-in-place, learning trajectories, and learning networks. “Place” is conceptualized as a nexus of interrelations; where social, political, institutional, and cultural coproduction occurs. “Trajectories” concern how students move between places. Leander et al.’s review of studies illustrate both the changing nature of physical mobilities as well as the emergence of virtual mobilities that involve technological mediation of space such as geographic information and global positioning systems. Mapping technology also illustrate and mediate students’ networks, as well as, key to this study, perceptions of possibility, exploration, and sense of place.

Data collection & analysis
Data was collected by sixteen youth ethnographers across the United States, in geographically distributed organizations identified by the connected learning research network as conducting programs centered on key elements of the connected learning framework. Youth ethnographers utilized the custom map feature of Google Maps to create local maps of their interests, career and otherwise. Mapping these points of interest in relationship to their connected learning sites provided the basis for analysis of their potential future mobilities. Again relying on the functionality of Google Maps, youth analyzed the feasibility of traveling to sites of career or personal interest by car, public transportation, or on foot. Connections between possible futures and their current connected learning program were further examined through consideration of skills and networks being developed at their sites.

Results
Preliminary findings suggest that youth ethnographers are attuned to which skills and interests are supported and developed in their connected learning sites, and are conscious of how these may or may not link to potential jobs and careers of interest. In distinguishing between places to pursue career-related, site-related, and present-day “for fun” interests such as local amusement parks and shopping malls, the youth also made distinctions between skillsets being developed at their current sites as being more or less relevant to their possible futures.

Significance
This research expands the focus on youths’ social spaces of learning as articulated by Leander et al. to include not only existing places, trajectories, and networks of learning, but potential, aspirational, and interest-driven ones. Using Google Maps to imagine possible futures and linkages to current learning ecologies suggests ways for connected learning sites to further support youth in their post-secondary aspirations in the “Last Mile.” In addition, there continue to be implications for equity and access with regards to how closely youths’ identified career interests and their connected learning experiences overlap: some career-related interests were perceived as being too physically distant from their sites to visit.

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