Spaces, places and technologies: a sociomaterial perspective on students’ experiences

Spaces, places and

technologies: a

sociomaterial perspective

on students’ experiences

Martin Oliver

London Knowledge Lab,

UCL Institute of Education

[email protected]

ioe.academia.edu/MartinOliver

25/02/15

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ELESIG NW: Spaces, Places & Technologies

Overview

“Digital literacies as a postgraduate attribute” project

Sociomateriality

Project methodology

Some themes from the work

Implications

Based on work undertaken with Lesley Gourlay and others

Slides will go up on Slideshare, and be linked to from academia.edu

References included at the end of the presentation

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The project

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Digital Literacies as a

Postgraduate Attribute?

JISC Developing Digital Literacies Programme

Led by Lesley Gourlay

http://diglitpga.jiscinvolve.org/Design Studio: http://tinyurl.com/q92jhzh

iGraduate survey / Focus groups / multimodal

journalling in year 1

Case studies across three areas in year 2:

Academic Writing Centre

Learning Technologies Unit

Library

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http://diglitpga.jiscinvolve.org/

http://tinyurl.com/q92jhzh

Digital literacy defines those capabilities which fit

an individual for living, learning and working in a

digital society

(Beetham, 2010)

Access

Skills

Social practices

Identity

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Digital Literacy is the awareness, attitude and

ability of individuals to appropriately use digital

tools and facilities to identify, access, manage,

integrate, evaluate, analyse and synthesize digital resources, construct new knowledge, create

media expressions, and communicate with others,

in the context of specific life situations, in order to

enable constructive social action; and to reflect

upon this process.

(Martin & Grudziecki, 2006: 255)


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Belshaw’s Eight Elements of Digital Literacies

(2011)

Cultural

Cognitive

Constructive

Communicative

Confident

Creative

Critical

Civic


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Drawing upon the frameworks outlined above, we

propose as a definition of digital literacies:

the constantly changing practices through which

people make traceable meanings using digital technologies.

Within this broad definition, specific aspects of

digital literacies can be investigated and explored

further, understood as in many ways offering a

continuity to our understandings of literacies in

general as social practice.

(Gillen & Barton, 2010)


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Moving on

Taxonomies of skills, assumed to be stable,

generic, measurable and transferable

Cognitive, attitudinal, and attributes

Attached to an idealised view of learner to be

‘produced’

How to explore complex, situated, mediated

meaning-making practices?


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Sociomateriality

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How should we understand

the roles of technology?

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)


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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)


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Stuff and spaces

Humans, and what they take to be their learning

and social processes, do not float, distinct, in

container-like contexts of education, such as

classrooms or community sites, 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: vii)


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The campus is best thought of not simply as a constraint but, to borrow Brown and Duguid’s phrase, as a ‘resourceful constraint’ (Brown & Duguid 2000: 246), one it would be premature to write off and which those developing distributed learning need to take seriously. […] The campus – or more generally, the co-location of learners, teachers, labs, class-rooms, lecture theatres, libraries and so on – refuses to lie down and die.

Those seeking to develop distributed education should understand the support a campus setting gives the educational process and should be prepared for the necessity to find new ways of providing that support in a distributed education context.

(Cornford & Pollock, 2005: 181, 170)


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Rather than starting analysis from a space out of

which objects move, this approach aims to map

mobilities and the ways in which spaces are

moored, bounded and stabilised for the moment, and the specific (im)mobilities associated with such

moorings. We might take such spaces for granted –

as, for instance, universities – but a mobilities

analysis would examine the ways in which such

spaces are enacted and become sedimented

across time.

(Edwards et al, 2011: 223)


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We recognise space as the product of

interrelations; as constituted through interactions,

from the immensity of the global to the intimately

tiny. […] We recognise space as always under construction. Precisely because space on this

reading is a product of relations-between, relations

which are necessarily embedded in material

practices which have to be carried out, it is always

in the process of being made. It is never finished;

never closed. Perhaps we could imagine space as

a simultaneity of stories-so-far.

(Massey, 2005: 9)


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Activity part one:

Where do you do your work?

Sketch a map of the places you do your job, or

study, or write


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Methodology

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Survey

Using existing data from iGraduate

Evaluation of student satisfaction

Patterns of student preferences

Superficial

“We don’t like how the VLE looks”

Very little to build understanding or challenge

preconceptions

What could we learn from this…?


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Focus groups

PGCE, MA students, PhD students, Online

masters’ students

Mapping exercise, leading to discussion of what,

where and when of studying

Difficulties recruiting PGCE students due to

logistics of school placements

Pros and cons of videoing focus groups: are we

studying people or practices…?

Identification of useful themes that informed design of subsequent work


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Journaling

12 students recruited from the focus groups

3 from each of the four groups (PGCE, taught masters,

taught masters at a distance, Phd)

Distance students interviewed via Skype

Given iPod touch

4 Members of staff

Interviews took place over 9-12 month period

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A structured sequence of interviews

A digital ‘biography’, exploration of current

practice, guidance on data generation

Students capture images, video and other forms of

documentation to explore engagement with

technologies for study

2-3 further interviews, building student analysis of

data via presentations

Progressively focused discussions

General experience; use of VLE, library; production

of assessed work


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First interview: develop your maps…

Explanation of maps (whilst drawing)

Talking through personal histories of use of technologies

Second interview: bring us images of…

Present and talk through why they were taken and what they mean

Focus on VLE, library, coursework

Subsequent interviews

Brought along presentations to discuss

Increasing responsibility for interpreting, not just generating, the data


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Rich body of data

Images, videos and presentation a powerful stimulus for discussion

Grounding interviews in specific practices, not decontextualised generalities

“Interview plus” (e.g. Mayes, 2006), similar to work undertaken on other projects exploring learners’ experiences of e-learning

Phased thematic analysis

First pass: disproving generalisations

Second pass: links to exising theoretical ideas

Third pass: development of new ideas (e.g. orientations)

Subsequent passes: refinement (e.g. spaces, resilience)


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Ethical considerations

Project secured institutional approval

Specific ethical considerations – confidentiality and anonymity

Sharing personal, private experiences

Images included other people (staff and children)

Managed through curation by participants, their choice of pseudonym, checking early publications with participants

Incentivisation / bribery

Long-term, time-intensive; what’s an appropriate recompense?


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Activity part two:

Show your map to someone else

Are there spaces in common?

Are there some spaces that are different?

Why?

Does this tell you anything about what you need

in order to work/study/write successful?


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Themes

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Not the student

experience…

No evidence that the student experience is singular

Marked differences in experiences and priorities across the four groups

Coping with whiteboards and staff room politics of access;

Using the VLE to access materials;

Working with library databases;

Using the VLE to create a sense of community (…and Skype behind the scenes…)

…etc

Differentiation and management of practices

across professional, personal and study


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No useful taxonomies

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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Orientations towards

technology

Curating

Fluent use, drawing together diverse resources, with practices ‘moored’ to devices and spaces of the learner’s choosing

Combat

Successful use, but a sense of precariousness; technologies that can’t quite be trusted

Coping

Scraping by, abandoning technologies and looking for other ways (with assistance) to get the job done

Not types of student, but types of practice.


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Patterns of staff working

Office work

Home work

Peripatetic work

Which practices were the institution willing to…

Acknowledge happen?

Support, financially or technically?

Benefit from?


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Sally’s complex studying


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Juan’s essay writing journey


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How Juan worked

Walking the stacks to browse and collect texts

Back and forth to desk with a computer, browsing electronic texts

Skim-reading to shortlist

Wanted measured reading and annotation later, in other spaces

Walked to another institution

Used girlfriend’s ID and password to log in to their network

Printed articles for reading on a printer that allowed double-sided printing

His sense of the library as a successful study space involved connecting it to another library, another institution’s computer networks and printers, and his girlfriend.


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Gertrude’s home and office


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My laptop lives on the end of that coffee

table. And it lives there because that's where the

electricity socket is, um, and that's where I spend

my evenings. Um, laid there with the laptop on my lap, um, doing a variety of stuff...I might be

shopping, I might be reading, again, my Kindle

might make it into the sofa, it might not. I might

read there. I might be answering emails. I might

be responding to things. Sometimes I might even

write there.

The office as a site of destructive testing


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Yuki’s sense of freedom


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Juan’s sense of place

Where I live it could be, you could be in a town sort

of anywhere and you wouldn’t really necessarily

notice. Whereas you come in here and you come

over the Waterloo Bridge and you see St Pauls and the Houses of Parliament, you know, you’re in

London, you’re doing something again. You know,

this is where people do important things and that,

kind of, thing and it gives it a reality. […] It focuses

me a little bit on that.

(Juan, Interview 3)


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Louise’s creation of

connections


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When I took some photos at the Globe I couldn’t

believe how easy it was to transfer into the

computer. It was just as easy as a digital camera

and the quality pretty impressive as well. So and then I can just copy them into my Interactive

Whiteboard.

(Louise, interview 3)


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Faith’s struggle to enter


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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, […] everybody wants to get to that computer where you can use the printer. […] 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?

(Faith, interview 2)


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Juan’s struggle to separate


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I like having a break between things and that kind of thing. And the same very much I think between home and university. […] When you’re in one thing then you’re there and you’re in that moment for a while and then you might change to sort of another one. […] Without too much work, I could do all of this [at home], you know, but I choose not to because I like the change. And I like the movement maybe as well, so it is, yes, it’s an important thing I suppose for there to be these sort of, these areas of not necessarily nothing, but of distinction, clear distinction between them.

(Juan, interview 1)


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Sally’s creation of barriers


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This is my portable hotspot on my phone, and I’m

using it to connect my internet, and I can’t use the

encryption on it because the computer was too

old to use the encryption, so in other words, I then had to come up with a scary name so that nobody

in my local area would, like, use my connection, so

I called it Trojan Horseman because that’s, like, I’m

some kind of scary hacker or something, so I

thought, if that’s an example of me... and I put an

O in so it looked, do you know what I mean, that

looks really dodgy, you wouldn’t click on that would you.


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Boundary marking is not about putting a fence

around a field, but about marking the relations that

can be made in specific enactments.

(Edwards et al, 2011: 231)


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Activity part three:

Look at your map again. Are there particular

spaces where:

You feel comfortable and in control?

It’s a struggle to work successfully?

You’ve excluded them (i.e. they’re missing!)

because you don’t want to work/study/write there?

What does this tell you about agency,

infrastructure, privacy, etc?


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Implications

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For policy

A persuasive narrative

We may think managers like numbers, but don’t underestimate the power of a good story

Enrolling students behind initiatives

Who gets to speak on behalf of students?

What do they say on their behalf?

Working with generalisations

The value of counter-examples

Use-case scenarios

Will this policy work for people who…

Do these estates/IT plans work for…


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For research

A really rich approach to generating evidence

Also fun!

The value of engagement with theory

Connecting institutional change initiatives with wider

debates and concerns

Useful concepts to sharpen interpretation (e.g.

identity, boundaries, mooring, etc)

‘Follow the actors’ – even when these aren’t human


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Bringing meaning back in

Deeper, more meaningful engagement with

students’ experiences than students allow

Celebration of diversity, rather than homogenizing it

The generation of new ideas about digital

literacy

Space and place, resilience

Construction and management of identities –

personal, professional, academic


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For practice

A useful process in terms of understanding the

students’ experience

A sanity check on what we’re asking students to

do

Available as materials that can be used in

workshops

http://jiscdesignstudio.pbworks.com/w/page/692941

57/Introducing%20Spaces%20and%20Places


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http://jiscdesignstudio.pbworks.com/w/page/69294157/Introducing Spaces and Places

References

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Beetham, H. (2010) Review and Scoping Study for a Cross-JISC Learning and Digital Literacies Programme. JISC, www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/funding/2011/04/Briefingpaper.pdf

Belshaw, D. (2011) What is ‘digital literacy’? A pragmatic investigation. Doctoral Thesis, Durham University. Available online: http://neverendingthesis.com/doug-belshaw-edd-thesis-final.pdf

Cornford, J. & Pollock, N. (2005) The University Campus as a ‘resourceful constraint’: process and practice in the construction of the virtual university. In Lea, M. & Nicoll, K. (Eds), Distributed Learning: Social and cultural approaches to practice, London: RoutledgeFalmer, 170-181.

Edwards, R., Tracy, F. & Jordan, K. (2011) Mobilities, moorings and boundary marking in developing semantic technologies in educational practices. Research in Learning Technology, 19 (3) 219-232.

Fenwick, T., Edwards, R. & Sawchuk, P. (2011) Emerging Approaches to Educational Research: Tracing the Sociomaterial. London: Routledge.


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http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/funding/2011/04/Briefingpaper.pdf

http://neverendingthesis.com/doug-belshaw-edd-thesis-final.pdf

Gillen, J. & Barton, D. (2010) Digital Literacies: a research briefing by the Technology Enhanced Learning phase of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme. London: London Knowledge Lab. Available online: http://www.tlrp.org/docs/DigitalLiteracies.pdf

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

Leander, K. & Lovorn, J. (2006) Literacy networks: following the circulation of texts, bodies and texts in the schooling and online gaming of one youth. Cognition and Instruction 24 (3), 291-340.

Martin, A., & Grudziecki, J. (2006). DigEuLit: concepts and tools for digital literacy development. Innovation in Teaching And Learning in Information and Computer Sciences, 5 (4), 249 -267.

Massey, D. (2005) For Space. London: Sage.

Mayes, T. (2006) The Learner Experience of e-Learning: Methodology Report. Available online: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/elearningpedagogy/lex_method_final.pdf


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http://www.tlrp.org/docs/DigitalLiteracies.pdf

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/elearningpedagogy/lex_method_final.pdf

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