 My name is Sharon Bain and I'm from the University of Edinburgh from the School of Education. Thank you so much for inviting me. I feel very privileged to be your external this evening. I want to talk about the space of distance education because for me, technological change doesn't just drive the development of new tools and new applications and new practices, it also drives changing ideas and for me I think one of the ideas that is going to shift, if not in 2015, at least maybe by 2025, is the idea of the university and what counts as university space. So that's what I want to address in my talk this evening. I thought it would be really nice to talk about this research to colleagues at the Open University because the way in which the Open University is spatial, is very different from the way in which Edinburgh University is spatial. So it seems to me interesting to think about the different spaces of a traditional kind of on-campus teaching-oriented university and think about that in comparison with a university like the Open University. So Edinburgh University, as I'm sure you are aware, is traditionally a campus-oriented university but we have a strategy of expansion of our online distance learning, quite a dramatic expansion plans. So that's really making us think quite seriously about what it means to be a university and that's what I would like to talk about in my ten minutes. In doing this I want to draw on a kind of theoretical notion of space, if you like, which is drawn from actor network theory perhaps and other spatial theories which talk about practices not taking place within a space, it's not about space as a container, it's about space as produced by the activities of the people working within it. So this is the concept of space that I want to use. And I'm also kind of engaging with mobility theory in a way which talks about how social sciences tended to be very much oriented towards sedentarism, so the privileging of stability, of place, of region, of city, of campus, of nation-state, whereas mobility theory sort of pushes us beyond that to think beyond territories and beyond sedentriness, it's a critique of sedentarism. So what I want to ask in the few minutes that I have are how do distance students at a traditional university at Edinburgh produce and constitute and construct university space? What do they think the institution is? And the research that I am speaking in the context of was conducted in relation to our master's programme in digital education which for Edinburgh is quite a big programme, it's got almost 200 postgraduate students all studying online at a distance. I know it's not big compared to your courses but for us it's pretty big. So this project asked, what does it mean to be a student at Edinburgh who's not in Edinburgh and what does this tell us about the changing nature of traditional university space? So the project I want to talk about very briefly is we generated interview and visual data with a group of students spread across the globe. These are all participants on this MSD programme, all people who were never intended to come to the campus. Yet to them the campus was something that was very important. So I'm just going to show you very quickly some of the things that these people said to us about university space and why it was important to them. I've grouped it into these three categories you see here. This is Edinburgh University Tartan. It's a very tasteful weave, I think you'll find. So students taught surprisingly about the notion of sentiment in relation to the physical campus of the university. So this extract that you can quickly read here is a US-based student who had tracked his family history down to two waves of immigration into the US and back to Scotland and then back to the US. For him, coming to study online at Edinburgh, he's based in Massachusetts or somewhere, felt like a homecoming, even though he never intended to come to Edinburgh. We found in this research, it was very surprising in the extent to which our distant students really cared about the history and reputation and campus of the University of Edinburgh, about the city of Edinburgh, about Scotland as a nation. Sometimes this manifested as what we playfully called Campus Envy, which was students having this sense that the touchstone of authenticity and an experience of being a student was to be located at a campus. So a few people said, I felt kind of jealous of people who were around in Edinburgh. That's what it means to be a proper student. This was particularly telling actually when we came to talk to people about graduation because graduation was this hugely important ritual and students who'd never ever intended to come to Edinburgh as part of their studies, a lot of them planned and a lot of them do come to Edinburgh to graduate. One said, I can't imagine any circumstance in which I won't come to a city to graduate. So again, this took us by surprise that there are campus-oriented rituals that distant students really cared about. So one of the ways in which we kind of, in which we engage with this idea is through our virtual graduation ceremony. We know graduation is an important ritual. We know that some students just can't get to graduation because they're based in Australia. So we run a graduation ceremony in Second Life and that's what you're looking at here. Second Life is a virtual world. What we do is we stream our real graduation ceremony live into Second Life. Students who are also graduating that day but can't come to Edinburgh go into Second Life with their families, with their tutors, with their friends. They watch the graduation ceremony happening in Edinburgh and then they process up and get their own scroll. They wear special University of Edinburgh robes in their Second Life avatars, which we've designed for them. So it's a really lovely ritual. And then the last couple of years, we've only done it twice now, but we've projected the Second Life virtual graduation into the McEwen Hall as well. So it's a very odd situation where we have on campus people looking at the virtual people graduating, looking at each other. It's ontologically a real mix-up, but kind of very enjoyable and very important and quite rich blurring of the boundary between the virtual and the real, between conceptions of space which are canvas-oriented and conceptions of space which are entirely digital and virtual. This is one of my very favourite images from the research project that I'm talking about. It's one of the research associates on the project, James Lam, with his newborn baby. He was a dissertation student at the time we did this research. He was also a new father. It seemed to sum up the little spaces of intimacy within which students conduct their studies. So we had lots of data from students which kind of reinforced this idea. This one from Selina saying, I'm sitting at the kitchen table. I've got all my stuff. I'm thinking about what I'm going to cook for dinner. The baby's kind of snorting. And then by contrast, we had other many students who were perhaps the more readily recognised distance student. Highly nomadic, very mobile students travelling the world while they study. Very dependent on their dongles, on their devices, on their iPads. These are students who were constructing the space of the university on their beds, on the corner of their sofa, in an airport lounge, in a bus, in a coffee shop. They were producing university space in the kind of in-betweeny bits of their lives. So this project kind of really highlighted to us that to be a distance learner is quite a paradoxical and big U has got a kind of thing to be. You're simultaneously inside and outside you're absent and present. You're stable and you're in flux. And I think this is something we need to think seriously about in traditional universities. I get to think differently about in distance universities, what is a university in a highly spatially kind of mixed up technological context that we're all working within. So I've posed a few questions at the end there because I know we're leading into the panel question session now. How can we think in a more nuanced way about academic geographies? Can we afford any longer in traditional universities to be focused on sedentarism and the privileging of campus? How would these findings be different here? And how can a more theorised notion of space help inform pedagogic innovation? On that, I'll finish. Thank you. Thank you.