Learning with technology as coordinated sociomaterial practice: digital literacies as a site of...
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Learning with technology as coordinated sociomaterial practice: digital literacies as a site of praxiological study Martin Oliver London Knowledge Lab Institute of Education, University of London [email protected] 1
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While considerable attention has been given to the concept of learning – what it is, how we might know it when we see it, and how to intervene in it – by contrast, technology remains under-theorised. While theoretical approaches that have developed accounts of the relationship between technology and human action, few of these are well represented within educational technology or networked learning. This paucity of theorisation has resulted in simplistic accounts of the role of technology in various kinds of learning, usually involving some kind of causal or determining mechanism. Such accounts are vulnerable to critique (e.g. Friesen, 2009), but nonetheless remain prevalent. In this paper, I will recap some of the problems with this position, and then consider alternatives that address issues around agency and the role of the social. Specifically, drawing on Mol’s concept of praxiology, developed in the context of work on the constitution of diseases in medical practice, I will explore alternative ways in which educational uses of technology can be understood. This value of this will be illustrated through the design of a study of digital literacies. Some implications of this include for researchers – including concerns about reflexivity – will then be drawn out.
Transcript of Learning with technology as coordinated sociomaterial practice: digital literacies as a site of...
Learning with technology as coordinated sociomaterial
practice: digital literacies as a site of praxiological study
Martin Oliver
London Knowledge Lab
Institute of Education, University of [email protected]
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What’s the problem?
• Educational technology has theorised “education” (a little) and “learning” (more), but not really the “technology” bit
• Technology as a black box– What are its effects, not how are these achieved?
• But technology is theorised elsewhere (e.g. Philosophy of technology, Science and Technology Studies)
• Networked learning as an opportunity to rethink this situation
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What theorisation we do have is a bit odd
• Technology as a way for designers to control users
• An instrumental orientation to research (Friesen, 2009)– A ‘technical fix’ to educational problems
• Technology that ‘constrains’ or ‘permits’ (i.e. controls users)– Cf. Grint & Woolgar, configuring the user – how do
they learn to be permitted or constrained?
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There are alternatives (even within Ed Tech )
• A focus on things like affordance (technology as control)
• But we also have, for example…– Activity theory (technology as tool in a system)– Communities of practice (technology as reification of
practice)– Actor-Network Theory …and after (technology as
emergent property of sociomaterial relationships)
…although not common, and not always used well
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Praxiology and the body multiple
• One response to Tara Fenwick’s call for “engaging with difference: multiple worlds”
• How practices coordinate people and things to achieve effects (not: “technology’s effects”)
• Use of different technology creates different worlds: questions about which are favoured, coordinated, rejected; and how
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Another praxis has been introduced, another approach taken: that of practice. The latter encompasses molecules and money, cells and worries, bodies, knives, and smiles, and talks about all of these in a single breath. […] If practice becomes our entrance into the world, ontology is no longer a monist whole. Ontology-in-practice is multiple. (Mol, 2002: 157)
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An example: different bodies?
• How can a gynaecological simulation, shown by US research to be valid, be seen as lacking in validity when used in Sweden (Johnson, 2008)? – If ‘fidelity’ maps to bodies, bodies would have to be
different– If ‘fidelity’ maps to practices…
• Practices as “ways of knowing reality”• Technology understood not as a collection of
decontextualised functions but in relation to people, practices and purposes.
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Atherosclerosis
• Mol’s ethnographic study of atherosclerosis in a Dutch hospital
This is the plot of my philosophical tale: that ontology is not given in the order of things, but that, instead, ontologies are brought into being, sustained, or allowed to wither away in common, day-to-day, sociomaterial practices. (Mol, 2002: 6)– Cf. Walker and Creanor’s discussion of
realism, to follow8
(Non-)Digital literacies as networked learning
Almost all of our interactions with other people are mediated through objects of one kind or another. For instance, I speak to you through a text, even though we will probably never meet. And to do that, I am tapping away at a computer keyboard. At any rate, our communication with one another is mediated by a network of objects – the computer, the paper, the printing press. And it is also mediated by networks of objects-and-people, such as the postal system. The argument is that these various networks participate in the social. They shape it. In some measure they help to overcome your reluctance to read my text. And (most crucially) they are necessary to the social relationship between author and reader. (Law, 1992: 381-2)
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The project• ‘Digital literacies as a postgraduate
attribute’– Lesley Gourlay, Jude Fransman, Martin
Oliver, Gwyneth Price, Susan McGrath– Diglitpga.jiscinvolve.org
• 2-year project– 1st year: researching students’ practices
(inc. survey data, focus groups, longitudinal journaling study)
– 2nd year: implementation of interventions
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A(nother) politics of networked learning
I think that we need to go back to the descriptive and think again about what it actually is. This is because STS has also taught us that description is already normative.
The basic argument can be expressed in two short steps. One: to describe a scene or a process is to (try to) arrange it in a particular way. And two: to arrange something in a particular way is to be normative because it could be arranged differently, and that difference might be better or worse. Normativity, then, is about good and bad arrangements, and it is about putting alternatives into play. And it is embedded in description. (Law, 2011: 5-6)
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A reflexive moment
• Patton: intended use by intended users, because telling participants is nice but changes nothing– Their place in networks doesn’t make them
powerful actors for change
• Can we explain (provide sociomateiral accounts of) how sociomaterial descriptions are used to decide about preferences for one reality over another?
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As illustration
I don’t feel part of the institution, particularly if I’m thinking that I’m going to see the test, for example, in an examination centre here. It’s so far from what the university really is about and the e-mail I got from the examination centre here is so cold and so... without really understanding what it means for us, that I don’t feel that I belong to the community of the university or the institute.
I found that, you know, obviously on an online course the tutor is the interface for the institution. So, your relationship with the tutor kind of... in many ways defines your relationship with the IOE.
•How can we reconfigure this? Should we?
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Coming up next…
• “Towards an ontology of networked learning” (Steve Walker & Linda Creanor)
• Directly addressing the problems referred to earlier
• Offering sociotechnical explanations (as opposed to ANT-derived sociomaterial ones)
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Ontology and reflexivity
• Taking a markedly different position on reality
• Bracketing off how we come to know about reality (“view from nowhere”)– vs –
• Implicating the researcher in the production of knowledge (“view from me”)
• Revealing “the researcher voice”…?15
