This document discusses conceptualizing educational technology through a sociomaterial lens. It argues that technology is often theorized as having effects on learning, but not how those effects are achieved through sociomaterial relationships. The document advocates analyzing digital literacies as situated practices that coordinate people and technologies in different ways, producing multiple realities. It provides examples analyzing how technologies shape bodies and medical understandings of conditions like atherosclerosis. The overall aim is a praxiological study of digital literacies as networked learning.

1. 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
m.oliver@ioe.ac.uk
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2. 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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3. 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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4. 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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5. 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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6. 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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7. 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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8. 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 follow
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9. (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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10. 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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11. 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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12. 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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13. 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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14. 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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15. 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”…?
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