Students’ study strategies are developing in response to an increasingly digital scholarly environment, and the term ‘digital literacies’ is gaining currency as a means by which to understand and support student engagement. However, 'digital literacies' tend to be positioned as measurable, discrete and ultimately residing in the individual. In this view, the student is seen as a ‘user’ of technologies, suggesting a clear division between the human and machine, action and context, writer/reader and text, and the university and other domains of life. This conception often reduces debates to questions of ‘skills’, undermining insights from New Literacy Studies (NLS) that ‘skills’ do not exist in a generic, decontextualized form, but are always situated in specific practices (Lea & Street, 1998). However, while NLS emphasises the social rather than the cognitive, it has not placed a great deal of emphasis on the embodied materiality of what students actually do, where they do it and what resources and artefacts they do it with. This paper will argue that Actor Network Theory (Latour, 2005) allows us to develop the insights of NLS by addressing sociomaterial aspects of engagements with texts in more detail. Drawing on these perspectives, a JISC-funded project was undertaken involving longitudinal, multimodal journaling by a dozen students from four programme areas (PGCE, taught MA, distance MA and doctoral) over a period of nine months. Each was issued with an iPod Touch handheld device and asked to take images and video documenting where and how they studied, and the resources they used. All students were interviewed 3-4 times across this period, with interviews structured around the images and other artefacts provided by the students. The interviews revealed that what disrupts engagement from these students’ perspective was not the presence of new technologies; instead it was the inability to reconfigure sites of study engagement. Disruption frequently arose from the well-established technologies that the institution provided and expected students to use, rather than from ‘bringing their own devices’ – devices which they were perfectly capable of using successfully in other settings. https://showtime.gre.ac.uk/index.php/ecentre/apt2013/paper/viewPaper/301

1. Rethinking disruption:
how students
(re)configure practices
with digital technologies
Lesley Gourlay & Martin Oliver
Institute of Education, University of London
l.gourlay@ioe.ac.uk
http://diglitpga.jiscinvolve.org

2. Digital literacies
Considering these points, the DigEuLit project has
developed the following definition of digital literacy:
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.
(Digital competence; digital usage; digital transformation)
(Martin & Grudziecki, 2006)

3. Belshaw‟s Eight Elements of Digital Literacies
Cultural
Cognitive
Constructive
Communicative
Confident
Creative
Critical
Civic

4. “Digital literacy defines those capabilities which fit an
individual for living, learning and working in a digital
society.” (Beetham, 2011)
Four-tier framework:
Access
Skills
Social practices
Identity

5. Universities and textual
practices
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)

6. 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)

7. Moving on from
taxonomies…
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)

8. …towards
digital
academic
practice
• Academic practices are
overwhelming textual
• These are situated in
social and disciplinary
contexts
• Textual practices are
increasingly digitally
mediated
• These practices take place
across a range of domains
• Students create complex
assemblages enrolling a
range of digital, material,
spatial and temporal
resources

9. Digital Literacies as a
Postgraduate Attribute?
JISC Developing Digital Literacies
Programme
http://diglitpga.jiscinvolve.org/
Institute of Education, University of
London
iGraduate survey / Focus groups /
multimodal journalling in year 1
Case studies across four areas in
year 2:
Academic Writing Centre
Learning Technologies Unit
Library

10. Sites of study

11. BYOD? We always did.
Neither all „institutional‟, nor personal
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).

12. A taxonomic list would be problematic
Time specific (and rapidly dated)
Unfeasibly long
Containing much that‟s irrelevant for individuals
Digital literacy as a kind of coping
Personal and situated, not monolithic and
general

14. In my school, I… we had… 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, actually we‟ve got six PGC
students over there, so it‟s, kind of, everybody wants to
get to that computer where you can use the printer. Yes,
so in the end I found actually I can also use the printer
from the library in the school.
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)

15. if I find something that‟s actually very useful and I
want to print, at the IOE you can‟t print double-sided,
so it‟s quite… it‟s more expensive. So I go to
[another college] and use my girlfriend‟s password
on the computers there and print. And so I then
have to change, so I spend quite a… more time
going between libraries if I want to print something.
(Juan)

16. So in the library […] if you‟re working at the table
and you want to check your email, you‟ve got to go
and log on – it takes 20 minutes to log on and that
kind of thing – so whereas this one, you can check
the email right there. So even though you‟re not…
I‟m not using [my iPod] for studying, it does free up
time.
(Juan)

17. 17

18. Conclusions
Digital literacies are not generic, but depend on the people,
things and places that a student can bring together to
advance their studies
Students have always used their own technology
„Disruption‟ occurs where students are unable to use
technologies to complete their studies
The technologies they need to use are influenced by
discipline and course
Institutions need to take this into account, providing
systems that support and permit what our students want
and need to do
Simple things – better wifi – make a lot of difference

19. Project blog:
http://diglitpga.jiscinvolve.org/wp/
Project webpage:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elea
rning/developingdigitalliteracies/DigLitPGAttribut
e.aspx
Project contacts:
Lesley Gourlay (l.gourlay@ioe.ac.uk)
Martin Oliver (m.oliver@ioe.ac.uk)

20. References
Beetham, H. (2011) Developing Digital Literacies: Briefing Paper in support of JISC
Grant Funding 4/11. Available online:
http://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
Fenwick, T., Edwards,R. & Sawchuk, P. (2011) Emerging Approaches to Educational
Research: Tracing the Sociomaterial. London: Routledge.
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.
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.