curation, combat or coping? student entanglements with technologies in HE.

Lesley Gourlay & Martin OliverInstitute of Education

overviewdigital mediation and textual practicesmultimodal journalling: findingstheorising agency

‘the university’ is enacted through day-to-day entanglements clustered around texts

these are overwhelmingly characterised by digital mediation devices and practices

texts and semiotic practices are elided in contemporary accounts of the university, rendered transparent, ‘innocent’ repositories, stripped of situatedness, materiality and embodiment

textual practices in the university are saturated with digital mediation, entanglements with devices, and hybrid domains

the study 2-year funded project http://diglitpga.jiscinvolve.org/ Digital Literacies programme, 10 projects

1st year: student research Focus groups Longitudinal multimodal journalling

2nd year: implementation projects

Yuki: ‘curation’

for example when I attend a lecture or a session I always record the session, and it’s after the session, but sometimes I listen to the lecture again to confirm my knowledge or reflect the session...when I, for example we’re writing an essay and I have to...confirm what the lecturer said, I could confirm with the recording data. (Yuki Interview 1)

Sally: ‘combat’

I was like bullied into it by people saying, oh, you’ll be left behind if you don’t use Facebook. So yes, that was when I got into it, so... And then... so now I would say Facebook, I’m not the most... like I said to you in the focus group, I’m a bit uncomfortable about the whole kind of like Big Brother aspect. (Sally Interview 1)

I feel like, also that Google is equally watching you. You know, they’re all watching you, they’re all trying to sell you things, and the thing is not, I don’t so much mind being bombarded with advertising as I mind having things put about me on things like Facebook that I don’t want. You know, I don’t want my friends to spy on me, I don’t want my friends to know what I listen to on YouTube. (Sally Interview 1)

Faith: ‘coping’

In my school, I… we had… our staff room was equipped… one, two, three, four, five, six, seven… seven computers now we can use and only one of them attached with a printer. So, actually we’ve got six PGC students over there, so it’s, kind of, everybody wants to get to that computer where you can use the printer. Yes, so in the end I found actually I can also use the printer from the library in the school.

So, six student teachers tried to use other computer. So, it, kind of, sometimes feels a bit crowded. And when the school staff want to use it, well, okay, it seems like we are the invaders, intruders?

theorising agency

sociomaterial perspectivesActor Network Theory (e.g. Latour 2005) Sociomateriality (e.g. Fenwick et al 2011).

‘If you can, with a straight face, maintain that hitting a nail with and without a hammer, boiling water with and without a kettle...are exactly the same activities, that the introduction of these mundane implements change 'nothing important' to the realisation of tasks, then you are ready to transmigrate to the Far Land of the Social and disappear from this lowly one.’ (Latour 2005: 71)

Enlarging the ‘margin of maneuver’ for studying

Power expresses itself in plans which inevitably require implementation by those situated in the tactical exteriority. But no plan is perfect; all implementation involves unplanned actions in what I call the “margin of maneuver” of those charged with carrying it out. In all technically mediated organizations margin of maneuver is at work, modifying work pace, misappropriating resources, improvising solutions to problems and so on. Technical tactics belong to strategies as implementation belongs to planning. (Feenberg, 1998: 113)

The under-determination of technologies for

studyingIf all this is true, why aren’t we more aware of the public interventions that have shaped technology in the past? Why does it appear apolitical? It is the very success of these interventions that gives rise to this illusion. Success means that technical regimes change to reflect interests excluded at earlier stages in the design process. But the eventual internalization of these interests in design masks their source in public protest. The waves close over forgotten struggles and the technologists return to the comforting belief in their own autonomy which seems to be verified by the conditions of everyday technical work. (p89)

implicationsUndermines stable, taxonomic accounts of digital literacyDestabilises notions of single, stable, human authorship and agencyOpens up political questions about the (non-)involvement of students in design

Feenberg, A. (1999) Questioning Technology. London: Routledge.

Grint, K. & Woolgar, S. (1997) The Machine at Work: Technology, Work and Organization. London: Polity Press.

Hayles, N. (1999). How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. London: University of Chicago Press.

JISC (2012) Digital Literacies as a Postgraduate Attribute? http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/developingdigitalliteracies/DigLitPGAttribute.aspx [Accessed 30 June 2012]

Kittler, F. (2004). Universities: wet, hard, soft, and harder. Critical Enquiry 31(1): 244-255.

Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.