Momentum or freefall? Digital literacies and the dangerous metaphor of

progress

Martin OliverLondon Knowledge Lab

Institute of Education, University of London

m.oliver@ioe.ac.uk

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• Metaphors and orientations

• Issues and theories

• Digital literacy and notions of progress

• Data

• Project “Impact”, and other ways of talking

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• Momentum: the impetus gained by a moving object – A linear model– Connotations of smooth forward motion,

unidirectional progress

• An enlightenment, modernist metaphor

• What’s the direction of travel? (…down?!)

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The trouble with words…

"You'd better be prepared for the jump into hyperspace. It's unpleasantly like being drunk."

"What's so unpleasant about being drunk?"

"You ask a glass of water.”

– Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

4© www.freedigitalphotos.net

…is it unpleasantly like having “impact”?

"And wow! Hey! What's this thing suddenly coming towards me very fast? Very very fast. So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like ... ow ... ound ... round ... ground! That's it! That's a good name --- ground!

I wonder if it will be friends with me?

And the rest, after a sudden wet thud, was silence.”

– Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

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Technology and progress

• Hard technological determinism– Boosters & utopianism– Doomsters & dystopianism

• Change is an inevitable consequence of technology (…even if we quibble about whether or not it’s desirable)

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Education is on the brink of being transformed through education; however, it has been on that brink for some decades now.

- Laurillard, 2008

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Technology and progress

• There are alternatives to simple linear narratives…– Soft technological determinism (technology an

influence rather than a determination)– Socially deterministic accounts– Non-deterministic accounts

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Bringing agency back to technology

• Feenberg (e.g. 2010)– Design is socially relative: it incorporates

social terms of reference– Where design prefers particular groups, social

injustice arises – Dominant technical codes, and the over-

determination of action: managerial control– ‘Room for maneuver’ as necessary and

desirable in designs

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Over-determination

• Technology “offers” (causes) or constrains – A way of designing user agency out– Appealing to designers who want users to

behave– Cf. Woolgar & Grint (1997) and “configuring

the users” (an STS take on the problem)

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• Affordances tend to collapse into unhelpful extremes– Either a determining, governing set of forces

controlling human action

– Or an unconstrained space in which human agency can operate unimpeded

• But literacy studies often ‘under-determined’– Skills and capabilities as ‘free floating’;

unimpeded agency

– Critique of cognitive, individual model

– Focus on meaning-making and texts

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Removing the agency of texts and tools in formalising movements risks romanticising the practices as well as the humans in them; focusing uniquely on the texts and tools lapses into naïve formalism or techno-centrism.

– Leander and Lovvorn (2006:301), quoted in Fenwick et al (p104)

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Grappling with inconsistent theories

• JISC funded project: “Digital literacies as a postgraduate attribute”– http://diglitpga.jiscinvolve.org/

• An opportunity to relate different ways of thinking about technology, learning, practice, cause, etc.

• If technology were deterministic this would be a non-issue– Technology would make us all literate, or we’d all

fail to become literate…

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• Project team -– Jude Fransman, Research Fellow– Lesley Gourlay, Project Director & Academic

Writing Centre– Susan McGrath, Students’ Union– Martin Oliver, Deputy Director & Learning

Technologies Unit– Gwyneth Price, Libary

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Grappling with definitions of digital literacies

“Digital literacy defines those capabilities which fit an individual for living, learning and working in a digital society.” (Beetham, 2010)

•Four-tier framework:– Access– Skills – Social practices– Identity

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A “top up” model of digital literacy

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• A modernist vision of linear progress

• Perhaps it’s plausible for uncontested, entry-level skills in controlled conditions

• Does it work anywhere else?

© freedigitalphotos.net

Grappling with methodology

• Multimodal journalling – To generate ethnographically informed data– Ethnography impractical

• Artefacts – emphasis on experience over abstraction, sense of fine-grained day-to-day lived practices– Reflecting diversity, complexity, etc– Data as close as possible to practices, not

accounts of practices17

Literacies as social practice

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Literacies as situated practice

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What do our students use?

• Lots of things - many institutional, but also many that are not institutionally supported– Office tools (primarily Microsoft, plus Google docs and Prezi)– Institutional VLEs (Moodle and Blackboard)– Email (institutional, personal and work-based)– Synchronous conferencing services (Skype, Elluminate)– Calendars (iCal, Google)– Search engines and databases (including Google, Google Scholar,

library databases, professional databases such as Medline, etc),– Social networking sites (Facebook, Academia.edu, LinkedIn) and

services (Twitter)– Image editing software (photoshop, lightbox)– Endnote– Reference works (Wikipedia, online dictionaries and social bookmarking

sites such as Mendeley)– GPS services– Devices (PCs at the institution and at home, laptops including

MacBooks, iPhones, iPads, Blackberries and E-book readers).

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“The student experience”

• No evidence that the student experience is singular– Marked differences in experiences and priorities across the four

groups

– PGCE, MA students, PhD students, Online masters’ students

– Coping with whiteboards and staff room politics of access; using the VLE to access materials; library databases; using the VLE to create a sense of community (…and Skype behind the scenes…)

– Professional, personal, study

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Complexity: domains and devices

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The only thing I struggle with […], is the issue of like keeping your private life separate from your work life because I think increasingly the two, you're being forced to kind of mush the two together. Because like [Another Institution] used to have its own email server and it would provide you with an email. Now it’s provided by Gmail and it’s like everybody knows that Gmail is the nosiest thing in the world and tracks absolutely everything you do. And […] I'm a little bit uncomfortable with the idea that my work email knows what shopping I do and, you know what I mean? I just find the whole thing is starting to get a little bit scary.

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Yuki

Japanese, female in her 40s, MA student

For me the most important thing is portability, because I use technologies, ICT, everywhere I go, anywhere I go. For example of course I use some technologies, PCs and laptops and my iPad in the IOE building, and in the IOE building I use PC, I use them in PC room, in library, and for searching some data or journals. In the lecture room I record my, record the lectures and taking memos by that.

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Digital/digitised texts, and boundary crossing

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Domains

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Themes from the journals

• Complex, constantly shifting set of practices• Permeated with digital mediation• Strongly situated / contingent on the material• Distributed across human /nonhuman actors• Texts are restless, constantly crossing apparent

boundaries of human/nonhuman, digital/analogue, here/not here, now/not now

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Grappling with consequences

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A stand against progressive definitions

• A focus on orientations, not skills and capabilities– A situated account implies situated development, not

monolithic institutional programmes– …agility, adaptability, resilience, tolerance of

ambiguity, ability to interweave institutional/non-institutional technologies, ability to work across a range of physical, temporal, digital and analogue domains

– A challenge to the general direction of the programme

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A stand against local policies

• A reaction against an over-determined IT strategy– From interview to transcript– From transcript to report– From report to working group– From report to recommendation document– From document to committee– From committee to constitution of a User

Group, creation of room for maneuver

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Humans, and what they take to be their learning and social process, do not float, distinct, in container-like contexts of education, such a classrooms or community sits, that can be sits, that can be conceptualised and dismissed as simply a wash of material stuff and spaces. The things that assemble these contexts, and incidentally the actions and bodies including human ones that are part of these assemblages, are continuously acting upon each other to bring forth and distribute, as well as to obscure and deny, knowledge.

(Fenwick et al 2011)

A link to wider debates and theorisation

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Revisiting today’s theme…

Have these promises led where expected? During this day we will explore more nuanced realities about new technologies and learning current in various settings and contexts.

(Event poster)

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Some conclusions

• A non-linear account– “Un-defining digital literacies” (Lesley

Gourlay)– A tolerance of mess, ambiguity and specificity– An account that unravels in very different

directions– Unhelpful to “top up” accounts

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Some different metaphors

• Not about sustaining momentum– A rush to where, exactly? (Unchecked freefall?)– Progress towards whose ends, and on whose

terms?

• Not all that much about impact– Less about the “effect” technology has had– More about collisions between technologies

and practices, and about rebounding and coping

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Some different metaphors

• Potential energy, not kinetic energy?– The project holding back momentum (so

things are visible, study-able; and to make decisions more deliberate)

– Building capacity to endure, cope and work around

– Entangling, not progressing

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Some different metaphors

• ‘Black boxing’– Not a tale of simplicity and sophistication, but

of decisions about which choices to force on people, and which to deny them(How was it ever plausible to assume one pattern would work for everyone…?)

• Shoring up– Not a model of progress, but an account of

how people rebuild and repair as edifices crumble

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Questions and comments?

http://diglitpga.jiscinvolve.org/