Technology, determinism and learning: exploring different ways of being

digitally literate

Martin Oliver & Lesley Gourlay

Overview

• Problems arising from work in educational technology and literacy studies

• Exploring some sociomaterial perspectives that help unravel these issues

• Illustrating these in relation to a JISC-funded project on digital literacies

• Some themes we’re thinking about as issues at the end

Where did this come from?

A moment in an ongoing conversation

She annoyed me…

…with this

…but it was well intentioned, so I had to work out what exactly my problem was…

• “A taxonomy of ICT affordances” (p115)– Accessibility– Speed of change– Diversity– Communication and Collaboration– Reflection– Multimodal and non-linear– Risk, fragility and uncertainty– Immediacy– Monopolization– Surveillance

• Would Gibson recognise this wish-list as affordances…?

…so I had to do this…

…which led to this, and this…

So what exactly is the problem?

• Lots of educational technology research talking about learning theory– Constructivism, constructionism, etc etc

• But almost nothing had a theory of technology at all– Half of the phrase, “educational technology”,

being ignored…?• What theory there was, was unconvincing

Common sense masquerading as theory

• An engineering/design sensibility

To use the words of educational technologist Rob Koper […] this research tends not to be “theory-oriented,” but rather “technology-oriented” in character. E-learning research, Koper (2007) explains, is not focused on “predicting or understanding events [in] the world as it exists” (p. 356); it instead seeks to “change the world as it exists” (p. 356; emphasis added). E-learning or technology-oriented research, in other words, attempts “to develop new technological knowledge, methods, and artifacts” for practical ends or purposes (p. 356). It is this applied, practical, and technological research that Koper (2007) says is ideally suited to e-learning. (Friesen, 2009, p.7)

• Affordance is a problem because…– It was a way of explaining how pilots landed planes (and so is pretty

lousy at explaining culture or art)– It was designed to do away with ‘mentalism’ (and so is pretty lousy

at explaining learning)– It doesn’t explain ‘misperception’, differences of interpretation

(except as error), meaning, etc.– There’s no way of specifying affordances analytically (just listing

what has happened and hoping it happens again)– Taken up as a way of lending weight to claims about what’s

“possible” – in the absence of evidence– It’s used incredibly inconsistently (slipperiness is what allows

theoretically dubious claims to stand)

• Personally, reacting against use of affordance as a totalising, essentialising movement; against black-boxing; the loss of materiality; loss of any sense of history; etc.

It is not clear theoretically what a “design” or “pedagogic” affordance is, or how these are distinguished. Nor do these claims—that something is afforded—offer an explanation of how that thing is achieved. In adopting a causal model, the process through which things happen is hidden.

This illustrates the pattern through which affordances are attributed to technologies. Rhetorically, these and other cases take a statement of the form, “A happened in situation B where C was used,” then claim, “C affords A.” In other words, the analysis here is observation followed by attribution, in which the situation is ignored. Theoretically, technologies are then treated as shopping lists of effects.

• 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)

• Wanted an account that didn’t reduce ‘the social’ to a ‘command and control’ systems/engineering paradigm (cf. Friesen)

So what’s in the literature?

• Education Resources Information Center search (2001–2011) using “technology” and “theory”– 7152 results, almost exclusively “false positives”– “theory” not technology, but learning, affect, technology integration,

organisational change, etc.

• Manual search (2001-2011) from educational technology journals that were ranked in the top 35 by impact factor, as of December 2009– British Journal of Educational Technology; Computers and Education;

Journal of Computer Assisted Learning; Journal of the Learning Sciences; Language Learning and Technology; also added Research in Learning Technology

The results

• 10 articles identified with a focus (even vaguely) on technology itself– Borderline cases: theoretical work on design-based research

(One paper); distributed cognition (One paper); learning (two papers) – technology important in understanding something else, not in its own right

– One discussion of the social shaping of technology (Selwyn, 2010)

– Five that concerned with ideas of affordance (Conole & Dyke, 2004, plus two responses to this article; Wijekumar, Meyer, Wagoner & Ferguson, 2006; and Derry, 2007, who was critical of the idea).

So what were these alternatives?

• Hard technological determinism– ‘common sense’ approaches; affordance– Both utopian and dystopian flavours

• Soft technological determinism– Some affordance accounts (‘permissive’); Cultural-Historical

Activity Theory (at least, as in HCI/Ed Tech)• Socially deterministic accounts

– Communities of practice; SCOT

– ANT somewhere else; describes situations but doesn’t explain or attribute causes

What I want to do with this

• Feenberg (e.g. 2010), and bringing agency back in to technology– Dominant technical codes, and the over-determination of

action– ‘Room for maneuver’ as necessary and desirable in designs– Some sense of purpose, and politics, around technology

• How far can we push the social?– Can we explain how people learn to use the technologies

they encounter?– What’s social about being shot? (Grint and Woolgar) What

do we need to give over to ‘nature’?

My response to some of this

• Trying to be clear about why the dominant position isn’t good enough– A sense of structures as created (“authored”), not just

‘given’• Identifying alternatives • Trying those out

– E.g. Textual analysis of educational sessions in Second Life, drawing on Barthes’ narratology

– A sense of structuring (process, not just ontological ‘fact’) and responding to structures

Anything you can do…

• Same session analysed from two perspectives (affordance, textual analysis)

• More extensive, more theoretically grounded claims possible with textual analysis

• Claims grounded in setting (culture/history) not universalised

• Textual analysis supported claims about pedagogy, technology ‘in contexts’ / networks, learners, etc.

Theoretical ideas in search of a setting

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

• 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…

‘Digital Literacies’ & New Literacies Studies

• Assumed to be free-floating generic ‘skills’, capabilities or ‘know-how’

• Context bound, situated practices implicated in the construction of complex, hybrid identities in a range of overlapping domains.

• Viewed this way, being digitally literate becomes a social achievement, in which technology is taken up to serve personal agency.

NLS, practices and materiality...

• Arguably, most NLS perspectives still place the human ‘user’ of technology at the centre

• Agency around text production is seen to rest with the student /author/user

• ‘Literacy event’ (Brice-Heath, 1982), foundational work focused on the social

• ‘Practices’ - emphasis on the human?• The material is implicitly rendered ‘context’ ?

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Artefacts & spaces • Blackboards etc ‘…artefacts meaningful to the

figured world of literacy’ (Bartlett & Holland 2002:13)

• Humans & artefacts as hybrid actors (Holland et al 1998)

• Literature on HE spaces (Temple 2007): lack of ethnographic work on practices

• Assumed to be non-places? (Augé 1995)• Spaces & episodes as literacy practices / events /

texts?• (Jones & Lea, 2008) Digital literacies as textual, not

technological practices

JISC project overview

• 2-year funded project• Digital Literacies programme, 10 projects• 1st year student research• 2nd year implementation projects

Focus groups: domains & devices

• Well, in my bedroom, on my bed, it's mainly my mobile and going through my emails, travel information, whether on Facebook, my mobile too. Then, um, and in the study room, that would be my laptop and, um, laptop, that would be Blackboard, research, entertainment. (MA student)

Journalling pilot

Journalling case study: Yuki

• Japanese, female in her 40s, MA student • I think I was not – how can I say? – like… I

wasn’t interested in the kind of things girls like: dolls and some kind of pretty things. Instead I was interested in computer and camera and the cars, everything boys tended to like. That is because, that is why I was interested, I became interested in the technology, and for the practical use’.

Print literacies

Digital/digitised texts

Ubiquitous technologies

• Yuki: 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.

Non-human actors

Non-human actors

Multimodality

• Lesley: What other types of uses of technology have you got for your studies?

• Yuki: Studies… to look for the written truth. Of course everyone makes that, may do, from the internet, and some, look for some data, other than journals and books from the website. Technologies… And I sometimes use YouTube or some moving images site to help my understanding. Sometimes I cannot understand what the one article said. I ask some moving images to explain

Domains

Situated textual issues

Discussion

• 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.

Sociomaterial approaches

• 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)

• ‘ ...the posthuman view configures human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals’

• (Hayles 1999: 3)

How we became posthuman

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• Hayles argues that Haraway’s cyborg is powerful metaphor but now ‘not networked enough’ (2006: 159)

• The individual no longer appropriate unit of analysis• ‘...incorporation of intelligent machines into everyday

practices creates distributed cognitive systems that include human and non-human actors; distributed cognition in turn is linked to a dispersed sense of self...’ (2006: 162)

From cyborg to cognisphere

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• ‘When narrative functionalities change, a new kind of reader is produced by the text. The material effects of flickering signification ripple outwards...the impatience that some readers now feel with print texts...has a physiological as well as a psychological basis. They miss pushing the keys and seeing the cursor blinking at them... Changes in narrative functionalities are deeper than the structural or thematic characteristics of a particular genre, for they shift the embodied responses and expectations that different kinds of textualities evoke. When new media are introduced, the changes transform the environment as a whole’

• (Hayles 1999: 48)

Flickering signification

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Contested sociomaterial practice

• Mol’s praxiology (2002 – the body multiple)– Ethnographic study of disease in a hospital– Exploring how different procedures, configurations

of resources, accounts and so on produced different realities

– Exploration of how particular possible realities came to be favoured at specific times (e.g. initial consultation, post death)

– Ontological politics: not just accounts, but accounts in competition

A politics-of-what explores the differences, not between doctors and patients, but between various enactments of a particular disease. This books has tried to argue that different enactments of a disease entail different ontologies. They each do the body differently. But they also come with different ways of doing the good. […] These questions are not answered here. Investigating the body multiple merely helps to open them up. […] Like ontology, the good is inevitably multiple: there is more than one of it.

The digitally illiterate teacher?

This technology thing can occupy most of your lesson planning because back then we only had black boards and all the kids had their own text book, and just do everything from the board. Now, it has changed the way that I teach as well because I need to apply a lot of software and use the ICT into my lesson as well, yes, and I think that’s going to be an essential thing in the future, especially I think the government here are trying to promote that as well. Also all the kids are very computer literate, so they know all the things about but as a teacher you don’t really know it. Kids can teach you in the beginning but then later on they probably will think if we can do it, how come you can’t do it.

• Has always used technologies – Blackboards, text books, etc.

• Envisages a future and a role that has to be different – “it [technology] has changed the way…”– “the government…”

• Positioning self as less literate that “the kids”– Digital generation/native– Ignores use reported in same interview of Email,

SmartBoards, PowerPoint, Google, Facebook, etc.

• A category judgement is seen to follow from this

• The false binary of ‘literacy’– A series of ‘literacy events’, involving situated sociomaterial

practices

• Who gets to classify a teacher as digitally literate, and on what basis? Whose ends does this serve? And what should be done in response to this?– An agenda for new interventions, interactions and

configurations of social practice

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)

Conclusions

• Patterns in Educational Technology literature, and some alternatives– Ongoing battle with determinism… even now…– Simplistic, un-nuanced use of ‘affordance’ as a way

of keeping people out of the way of design• Methodological tensions between structuring

and assemblage, and our interpretation

Conclusions

• Literacies and affordances concern relationships between two categories seen as an unproblematically separate binary

• 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

• How can we move beyond these simplistic binaries?