Technology, determinism and learning: exploring different ways of being digitally literate

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

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…?

…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’ ?

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

22

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)

Technology, determinism and learning: exploring different ways of being digitally literate

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’.

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.

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

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)

How we became posthuman
• ‘ ...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)

41

From cyborg to cognisphere
• 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)

42

Flickering signification

• ‘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)

43

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?

Technology, determinism and learning: exploring different ways of being digitally literate

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