[NABS-L] Travel around campus

[Brian Buhrow]

	hello Terri.  I don't know if these suggestions will be helpful, but they are things I
find helpful when I am learning a new campus, or if I find I have trouble remembering things
about a particular campus, or route to a specific place on a campus.

1.  If possible, go to campus on a day when you don't have classes and do a practice walk or
two to your classroom locations.   If you get lost, back track until you get to yor starting
location and start the route again.  As you travel, either when you'r lost, or when you know
where you are, pay attention to things you encounter, i.e. the presence of benches, the texture
of pavement, the width of walks, the presence or absence of curbs, the presence or absence of
traffic sounds and the general direction of those traffic sounds.  Don't stress if you can't
remember every detail, just take in as much detail as you can.  Some of it will go away, but
over time, as you do the routes more frequently, details wil come back and pieces of what you
encounter will begin to fit together.  I think of this part of learning a place as the island
effect.  I learn the details of a specific location, but don't know where to place it in the
mental map I keep of most locations I visit.  As I visit the same place more frequently, these
snapshots, or islands, begin to grow larger in my head as I begin to put them together and form
a more "continental" view of the place.  Eventually, I'll be able to hold a pretty complete map
of the campus in my head and be able to locate myself on that map at any given time.  The
details I remember from my first explorations  become clues to helping me locate myself on that
map if I find myself lost at some point in the future.  The reason for going when you don't
have classes is to reduce the pressure of trying to do this while also rushing to get to class
on time.  It takes time to do this exploration and it's helpful if it can be done when not
being forced to worry about other things.

2.  If you can find a friend to do some of this exploration with who knows the campus and who
can give you additional contextual details as you walk around, that would be helpful.  This is
something you can do with a mobility instructor, but if that resource is limited, willing
friends can be very helpful here too.  Just explain to them the purpose of what you're doing,
so they know to give you information and not just navigate you to your location.

3.  I think you could use AIRA or Be My Eyes for some of this work as well, but I don't have
any real experience with actually doing it except to say that, again, it's important to make it
clear to them that you don't want them to just navigate you to your location, but to provide
aancillary information as you travel, under your own direction, answering your questions as you
go.

4.  Learning the complexities of a large campus takes time, so be gentle with yourself.  I find
that I'll learn a route to a given location from a given location, but, over time, I begin to
change that route slightly, as I discover new paths, and this helps me build my mental map, as
I described earlier.

5.  If the external walkways are public streets, you may be able to get tactile maps of the
area you'r interested in learning from the San Francisco Lighthous's TMAP project.  

https://lighthouse-sf.org/tmap/

There, you can either order a tactile map of the area you're interested in learning, or, if you
have access to a tactile embosser, you can download and emboss your own maps.  You don't hafve
to be a braille reader for this to be extremely helpful.

I hope these ideas are helpful and, happy exploring!
-Brian