endless distractions...

i did mean to update this towards the end of last week, but 'distraction' has been a bit of a theme recently. aside from the distractions provided by various other, urgent work-related things (from which the tweets themselves have been proving welcome distraction, obviously...) we've recently received the first sets of longer summaries from the participants - which have sent me off in all sorts of directions. and one of the themes that's come up time and again is that of - you've guessed it! - distraction(s) within the environment.

we picked 3 things that each participant had talked about, and asked them to provide a little more information about each. the areas we asked about covered things such as:

• choice of physical location for activity (eg, do you only choose this location for one type of learning activity, or does it support others equally?)
• what made this location work for you and/or what about it hindered you (eg, presence or lack of technology?; access to resources and/or people?; atmosphere? etc)
• opportunistic use of locations (eg, unbooked classrooms, transport, etc)

we've now got some fairly rich summaries that cover a number of issues, which we're hoping to investigate further during the later interviews.

one thing that's struck me, though, is the human dimension to the spaces that our students are using. in some cases, having other people around provides a distraction (sometimes welcome, sometimes not!). for example, some students prefer not to use a particular location because the other people who use it create too much noise, preventing them from concentrating or having meaningful discussions. on other occasions, lack of other people can be equally disturbing - one student describing parts of the library as 'too quiet' to concentrate; another talking about how she doesn't like studying in the library over night as it's 'too spooky' with only security staff around. conversely, another student talks about how she often chooses the library to work in because although she can access resources from home, the presence of other students - even those she doesn't know - makes her feel 'safe'.