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
m.oliver@ioe.ac.uk
ioe.academia.edu/MartinOliver
25/02/15
1
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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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
25/02/15ELESIG NW: Spaces, Places & Technologies
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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)
11

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)
13

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
28

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).
29

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.
30

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?
31

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.
34

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
36

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)
38

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)
40

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
43

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.
46

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)
47

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…
50

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
51

 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
52

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
53

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/Briefi
ngpaper.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.
55

 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/el
earningpedagogy/lex_method_final.pdf
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