What shapes what? Technologies and their relationship to learning

WHAT SHAPES WHAT?
TECHNOLOGIES AND THEIR RELATIONSHIP
TO LEARNING

Martin Oliver
Institute of Education,
University of London
m.oliver@ioe.ac.uk

ABSTRACT
• Although there is a considerable body of work that explores
educational uses of technology, and highly developed accounts of
what learning is, surprisingly little research in education has asked
what technology is, or what its relationship to learning consists of.
When these matters are considered at all, they tend to be framed in
technologically deterministic ways, with technology either 'causing' or
at the least 'offering' and 'constraining' learning. In this talk, I will
provide an overview of this way of framing technology and identify
problems that follow from it. I will outline alternative positions that
could be adopted, including Communities of Practice, the Social
Construction of Technology and Actor-Network Theory, and discuss
their points of connection to this debate. Using examples drawn from a
JISC-funded project on digital literacies, I will draw out the implications
of these positions for research.

• If someone is learning in a way that uses information and
communication technologies (ICTs), they are using e-learning.
They could be a pre-school child playing an interactive game;
they could be a group of pupils collaborating on a history project
with pupils in another country via the Internet; they could be
geography students watching an animated diagram of a volcanic
eruption their lecturer has just downloaded; they could be a
nurse taking her driving theory test online with a reading aid to
help her dyslexia – it all counts as e-learning.
(DfES, 2003)

• Considerable effort has been made to making sense of what we
mean by ―learning.‖ This is an important and serious issue, and
one that is obviously worthy of considerable attention
(see, eg, Mayes & de Freitas, 2004). However, it is not the
whole story. An account of educational technology that can only
explain ―education‖ and not ―technology‖ runs the risk of dealing
naively with an important part of its field of study. The
consequence of this is a failure to provide convincing accounts
of the link between technology use and learning.
(Oliver, 2012)

• If one were to consider the field as characterised as a vertical knowledge structure one
would consider the ―real‖ field to be that most entrenched domain known as instructional
technology, instructional design or, nowadays, as educational technology. Certainly such
a domain exists, (although its changing or inconsistent name is telling). It is positivist in
approach and method, based on instructivist (or more recently cognition) theories. It is
most firmly located in the US although its spread is global and includes Europe and South
Africa. It is described as having known, clear definitions, published by an acknowledged
association, it has specified competencies as a profession, and agreed sources of
research findings.
These tensions about science versus social science are allied with differences of opinion
regarding whether the field is coherent and cohesive, or incoherent and fragmented. This
latter representation is more prevalent, and can be usefully exemplified as a horizontal
knowledge structure consisting of specialised ―languages‖ with specialised modes
of interrogation and criteria for the construction and circulation of texts. These
―languages‖ are made up of a cluster of elements with criteria for legitimate texts, what
counts as evidence, and what counts as legitimate questions. From this
perspective, instructional design is only one of the specialist languages of the field, which
would then comprise other languages as well.
(Czerniewicz, 2010)

• In order to show, convincingly, that a topic is absent from discussions in the field requires
a systematic approach to reviewing work. In this case, a systematic review was
attempted, although this proved problematic: while an Education Resources Information
Center search for the period 2001–2011 using the key words ―technology‖ and ―theory‖
returned 7152 results, these were almost exclusively what could be described as ―false
positives‖, in that they contained the terms but were not actually about a theory of
technology. Instead, to ensure the rigour of this review, a different approach had to be
adopted. A manual search was conducted, covering the last decade‘s worth of articles
from educational technology journals that were ranked in the top 35 by impact factor.
(Oliver, 2012)
• Ten papers identified:
• Theoretical work on design-based research; technology as a way of instantiating,
developing and contributing to theory.
• Technology as part of a system of distributed cognition or learning (3 cases).
• One paper on the social shaping of technology
• Five on affordances

• E-learning exploits interactive technologies and communication
systems to improve the learning experience. It has the potential
to transform the way we teach and learn across the board. It
can raise standards, and widen participation […] It cannot
replace teachers and lecturers, but […] it can enhance the
quality and reach of their teaching, and reduce the time spent
on administration. It can enable every learner to achieve his or
her potential, and help to build an educational workforce
empowered to change. It makes possible a truly ambitious
education system for a future learning society.
(DfES, 2003)

• The seductive lure of technology in policy
• A material thing that can be
bought, counted, given, used, monitored
• A causal force that ‗does learning‘ to people

• Games and game play tend to be treated as ―out there,‖ beyond
the school gate, in some better, more authentic, more
democratic, more meaningful place, other than the current and
failing educational regime. By bringing games into educational
practice and theory, the hope is, it often seems, that the
diseased, geriatric body of education can be treated through the
rejuvenating, botox-like effect of educational game play.
(Pelletier, 2009: 84)

• The immediate factors shaping the debates about evidence-based
practice have been decisively influenced by the political ascendancy
of New Labour. David Blunkett, as Minister for Education, argued in
2000 that ‗we need social scientists to help determine what worked
and why, and what types of policy initiative are likely to be most
effective‘ (cited in Evans & Benefield, 2001, p. 527). This drive to
establish effectiveness was linked to funding initiatives and their need
to ensure value for money in relation to measurable outcomes. The
discourse of ‗what works‘ has, therefore, become dominant in judging
the value of research outputs, and educational research in particular
has been castigated for failing to deliver proper cumulative evidence
that could inform policy and practice.
(Clegg, 2005: 416-417)

• Some have surmised that teenagers use different parts of their
brain and think in different ways than adults when at the
computer. We now know that it goes even further—their brains
are almost certainly physiologically different. […] Digital Natives
accustomed to the twitch-speed, multitasking, random-
access, graphics-first, active, connected, fun, fantasy, quick-
payoff world of their video games, MTV, and Internet are bored
by most of today‘s education, well meaning as it may be.
(Prensky, 2001)

• The affordances of the environment are what it offers the
animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill.
(Gibson, 1979, p. 115)
• An account that seeks to rule out ‗learning‘ (and all ―mentalism‖),
although there are some concessions about ―attunement‖
• Wanted to rule out the ―subjective‖ world, or the world of
―consciousness‖ (Gibson, 1979, p. 129)
• Relational, but somehow automatic

• Technologies as ―a phenomenon captured and put to use‖ (p50)
• Phenomena ―are simply natural effects, and as such they exist
independently of humans or technology‖ (p49)
• Technologies ―evolve‖ through the complex combinations of simpler
technologies
• ―Descent‖ amongst ―families‖ of technology explicitly tries to rule
people out of the picture
• ―people are required at every step of the processes that create
technology [but this] is not a discussion of the human side of
creating technology [... but] the logic that drives these purposes‖
(p. 6)
(Arthur, 2009)

BUT DOES IT WORK?
• Educational researchers have conducted media comparison
studies from the earliest days of the introduction of technology
into education. For example, Saettler (1990) found evidence of
comparisons of educational films with classroom instruction
being conducted in the 1920s. Comparative research designs
were applied to every new educational technology as it was
developed, including programmed instruction, instructional
television, and more recently computer-based instruction.
However, for decades the results of such media comparison
research studies have usually been ―no significant differences‖.
(Reeves, 2005: 298)

• Much research in Higher Education focuses on technique at the expense of
studying motive or values (Zukas and Malcolm, 1999). […] By assuming that the
problems facing education (and in particular, e-learning) are technical, evidence-
based practice (in the sense adopted in medicine) becomes both feasible and
desirable. If the sector is faced with a simple problem concerning the skilled use
of technology, then it makes sense to refine systematically the techniques
through which technology is applied. However, if teaching and learning is seen
as being more complex than the application of technology, this approach
becomes problematic. We cannot draw reliable, transferable conclusions about
practice if our model of that practice is incomplete, ambiguous and provisional.
[…] Thus, unless we are willing to conceive of e-learning, or any other aspect of
education, as being a standardised treatment that is applied to students (a view
educational evaluators rejected over 30 years ago […] and which is equally
denigrated by educational and social researchers […]), the uncritical adoption of
evidence-based practice, as outlined above, cannot be justified.
(Oliver, 2003: 392-3)

• ―Learning as a weapon system‖
• Cognitive science provides the terms needed to understand the
human user as a specifically computational component
‗‗interposed‘‘ between a computer systems‘ input and out- put
devices. Texts in e-learning, and in educational technology
before it, invoke the discourse of the ‗‗dyadic‘‘ and ―symbiotic‘‘
relationship of learner and computer in a manner remarkably
reminiscent of language used by military researchers and
historians.
(Friesen, 2010: 75-6)

• The metaphors and the discourse of the Cold War-closed world are
not difficult to recognize in the ADL‘s and others‘ descriptions of ‗‗total‘‘
scientific, technological solutions—solutions that, in effect, use the
power of computers and networks to vanquish the ‗‗evils‘‘ of ignorance
and inefficient learning. It is also not difficult to see how US military
thinking or values—for example, its prioritization of technological and
engineering approaches, its emphasis on ‗‗absolute‘‘ solutions to
human problems—are articulated as a kind of technical code in the
standards and systems of SCORM and ADL. Not only do these
standards and systems involve total, technical solutions to complex
problems though high-tech command and control, but also include the
extension of these solutions globally, ideally to all educational sectors.
(Friesen, 2010: 79)

• The meta-analysis found that, on average, students in online
learning conditions performed modestly better than those
receiving face-to-face instruction. […] Analysts noted that these
blended conditions often included additional learning time and
instructional elements not received by students in control
conditions. This finding suggests that the positive effects
associated with blended learning should not be attributed to the
media, per se.
(US Department of Education, 2010)

• Education is on the brink of being transformed through
technology; however, it has been on that brink for some
decades now.
• (Laurillard, 2008)

• Bimber […] draws distinctions between nomological
accounts, providing ―descriptions of an inevitable technological
order based on laws of nature‖ (p81);
normative accounts, in which technology is unquestioned
because questions about efficiency and productivity replace
political and ethical questions about use;
and the unintended consequences account, which recognises
willful, ethical and social actors but suggests they are simply
unable to anticipate all of technology‘s effects.
(Oliver, 2011)

• Hammond & Trapp (1992): CAL as a trojan horse for
educational change
• Soloway (1997) – ―Trojan Mouse‖
• E-learning is often talked about as a ―trojan mouse‖, which
teachers let into their practice without realizing that it will require
them to rethink not just how they use particular hardware or
software, but all of what they do.
(Sharpe and Oliver, 2007: p.49)

• Post-Gibson Affordances: conceptually, ‗travelled‘ via Human-
Computer Interaction
• ―The term affordance refers to the perceived and actual
properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties
that determine just how the thing could possibly be used‖
(Norman, 1988, p. 9)
• Later regretted ‗real‘ and ‗perceived‘ affordances
• A struggle to fend off cultural influences on design in favour of
‗natural‘ features but (arguably) technology as communication

• We are interested in asking questions about what uses ICT invites and
facilitates, what it lends itself to and what it can do well. A potential
difficulty with using a term so popular in the field of design is that ‗use‘
tends to be focused on how something ‗should‘ be used, what it is
designed for. Discussion about affordance can be limited to the
intended, prescribed or designed function of technology. We are also
interested in exploring the creative and innovative way people respond
to technologies and perhaps adapt them for use in unforeseen
circumstances. An affordance of the technology does not simply refer
to the intended use but also to the unintended consequences.
(Conole & Dyke, 2004: 301)

• 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)

• To realize the fullest potential for online learning, our methods of
research and development must be fundamentally changed, but
additional changes are needed. First, we must shift from a position
that views learning theory as something that stands apart from and
above instructional practice to one that recognizes that learning theory
is collaboratively shaped by educational researchers and practitioners
in context. Educational technology is a design field, and thus, our
paramount goal of research should be solving teaching, learning, and
performance problems, and deriving design principles that can inform
future decisions. Our goal should not be to develop esoteric
theoretical knowledge that we expect practitioners to apply. This has
not worked since the dawn of educational technology, and it won‘t
work in the future.
(Reeves, 2005: 304)

• A fundamental assumption of many learning scientists is that
cognition is not a thing located within the individual thinker but is
a process that is distributed across the knower, the environment
in which knowing occurs, and the activity in which the learner
participates. In other words, learning, cognition, knowing, and
context are irreducibly co-constituted and cannot be treated as
isolated entities or processes.
(Barab & Squire, 2004: 1)

• A critical component of design-based research is that the design is
conceived not just to meet local needs, but to advance a theoretical
agenda, to uncover, explore, and confirm theoretical relationships.
Although providing credible evidence for local gains as a result of a
particular design may be necessary, it is not sufficient. Design-based
research requires more than simply showing a particular design works
but demands that the researcher (move beyond a particular design
exemplar to) generate evidence-based claims about learning that
address contemporary theoretical issues and further the theoretical
knowledge of the field.
(Barab & Squire, 2004: 5-6)

• Technology as something that embodies theory
• Embodied theory as something that can cause learning
(or at the least, shape it)
• Associated with a moral obligation to undertake
applied, instrumental research

• Around each problem, several variants of solution can be identified
(figure 10). In the case of the bicycle […] This way of describing the
developmental process brings out clearly all kinds of conflicts:
conflicting technical requirements by different social groups (for
example, the speed requirement and the safety requirement);
conflicting solutions to the same problem (for example, the safety low-
wheelers and the safety ordinaries); and moral conflicts (for example,
women wearing skirts or trousers on high wheelers; figure 12). Within
this scheme, various solutions to these conflicts and problems are
possible – not only technological ones but also judicial or even moral
ones (for example, changing attitudes towards women wearing
trousers).
(Pinch & Bijker, 1987: 38-9)

• ―Configuring the user‖
• The ‗black box‘ of the desktop PC‘s casing
• Manuals, training, conventions – and different standards for
those on the inside of the company
• Not what the technology can do, but what users need to do to
make the technology work as designers hoped
(Grint & Woolgar, 1997)

• Collis et al’s 19 dimensions of flexibility, covering:
• Time (starting, finishing, assessment, pace)
• Content (topics, sequence, resources)
• Entry requirements (prior
knowledge, experience, qualifications)
• Pedagogy (approach, social interaction, language, design)
• Delivery logistics
(schedule, location, interactions, communication, support)
(Collis et al, 1997)

• The flexible student is not a spontaneous occurrence. Students
(including full-time students) have been engineered to become
more ‗flexible‘ as a result of policies, which have put more
financial pressures on them to work in particular ways. It has
also the created conditions under which the only way for many
adults to access higher education is via ‗flexible‘ modes of
delivery. In this sense, students are forced to become ‗flexible‘
and the flexibility to which they are supposed to conform is a
particular pre-determined set of learning practices or process.
(Clegg & Steel, 2002)

• Those with social advantage find it easier to take advantage of
new opportunities; advantage can be perpetuated, not eroded,
by introducing new forms of learning and teaching.
(Holley & Oliver, 2010)

• ‗The university‘ is a highly heterogeneous institutional
ensemble, which exists primarily in the heads of people who
constituted it, and in a myriad of locally negotiated practices and
interactions. This university, as an institution, often only appears to
exist ‗virtually‘.

The very notion of information, which sits at the root of the notion of a
virtual university and its ability to abstract from the place – the
specific, the parochial – contains within it a powerful incentive to
formalise, to standardise, to make explicit, to make concrete.
(Cornford, 2000)

• Once faculty and courses go online, administrators gain much
greater direct control over faculty performance and course
content than ever before and the potential for administrative
scrutiny, supervision, regimentation, discipline and even
censorship increase dramatically. At the same time, the use of
the technology entails an inevitable extension of working time
and an intensification of work […] It also allows the
administration, which claims ownership of this commodity, to
peddle the course elsewhere without the original designer's
involvement or even knowledge.
(Noble, 1998)

• Too often instructional designers leave these important what-to-
teach decisions to so-called subject-matter-experts (SMEs).
Often a SME knows how to perform the task that is the goal of
instruction but is unaware of the knowledge components that
are required to acquire this knowledge and skill. A primary role
of the instructional designer is to determine these granular
knowledge components and their sequence.
(Merrill, 2001, p293)

• It is hard to read such accounts without recalling the alarmist
predictions of Noble (1997) in which academics are systematically
marginalised in the interests of economic efficiency. Requiring
academics to produce metadata becomes an interesting exercise of
power. This might be interpreted as a beneficent act, empowering
lecturers to describe their own practice without reliance on information
specialists such as librarians. However, the way in which academics
are allowed to describe their materials is telling: it must follow set
rules and use a controlled vocabulary, which (by virtue of being
‗generic‘) cannot precisely reflect their practice.
(Oliver, 2004)

• What this reveals is how the move to teaching online renders
the role of the teacher both the same and different
simultaneously. The purpose and strategic direction may remain
unchanged, but the methods of achieving this alter in significant
ways.
(Price & Oliver, 2007: 24)

• Social shaping of technology
• The engineering of values and practices
• Sometimes, also their preservation
• Does it explain everything?
• What‘s social about being shot? (Grint & Woolgar, 1997)
• Classification as a shooting, production of the tools
(gun, bullet, etc), determination of cause of death, understanding
of what death means, etc.
• Does there remain an asocial core for the person being shot?

• 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)

• 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
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)

• Third-generation cultural-historical activity theory
• Expansive learning
(Engestrom, 2001)

Tool

Subject Object Outcome

Rules Community Division
of
Labour

52

Tool Tool

Subject Object O1 O2 Object Subject

Rules Community Division Division Community Rules
of of
Labour Labour

(Engestrom, 2001) “Object 3”

53

• Participation: ‗complex process that combines doing, talking, thinking,
feeling, and belonging. It involves our whole person including our bodies,
minds, emotions, and social relations‘ (p56)
• Reification: ‗giving form to our experience by producing objects that congeal
this experience into thingness‘ (p58)
(Wenger, 1998)
• From a theoretical point of view to talk about artifacts in terms of reification is
precisely viewing the artifact not just as a physical object but as a process of
attributing meaning through time and through space. If an artifact travels
across boundaries from one community to another, the process of reification
by which it becomes part of a practice changes substantially across those
boundaries.
(Wenger, in Binder, 1996: 101)

• What we have learned is that even if no totalizing approach makes sense, the
tensions in the industrial system can be grasped from ‗within‘, by individuals
immediately engaged in technically mediated activities and able to actualize
ambivalent potentialities suppressed by the prevailing technological rationality.
I call this ‗democratic rationalization‘. It starts out from the consequences of
technology itself, from the ways in which it mobilizes the population around
technological mediations. In the new technical politics, the social groups so
constituted turn back reflexively on the framework that defines and organizes
them: ‗we‘ as patients, users of a domestic computer system, participants in a
division of labor, neighbors of a polluting plant, are the actors. It is this sort of
agency that holds the promise of a democritization of technology. Technical
politics foreshadows a world in which technology, as a kind of ‗legislation‘
affecting every aspect of our lives, will emerge from these new types of public
consultation.
(Feenberg, 1999: 105)

• 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.
• (Mol, 2002)

• Historically situated accounts; particular and specific
• In some cases, also explicitly inconsistent
…but what can we then say about anything?

RESEARCHING TECHNOLOGY AND LEARNING
ANYWAY

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

• Yuki‘s journal
• 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‘
• What kinds of conception is she invoking?

• Faith: a 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.‘
• Again, what are her ways of framing this?

• Sally: it‘s out to get me…
• The only thing I struggle with, like I just mentioned it earlier
before, is the issue of like keeping your private life separate from
your work life because I think increasingly the two, you're being
forced to kind of mush the two together.
Because like [college name] used to have its own email server
and it would provide you with an email. Now it‘s provided by
Gmail and it‘s like everybody knows that Gmail is the nosiest
thing in the world and tracks absolutely everything you do. And
[…] I'm a little bit uncomfortable with the idea that my work email
knows what shopping I do and, you know what I mean? I just
find the whole thing is starting to get a little bit scary.
• Again, what conceptions here? And why?

• Yuki‘s library
• Materiality, ephemerality, digitisation, inscription, mobilit
y
• ‗Curation‘ of multimodal texts
… for example when I attend a lecture or a session I always
record the session, and it‘s after the session, but sometimes I
listen to the lecture again to confirm my knowledge or reflect
the session...when I, for example we‘re writing an essay and I
have to...confirm what the lecturer said, I could confirm with
the recording data.

• Yuki‘s books
• Remaking contexts of study

• ―The bathroom is a good place to read‖

• What does it take for our students to learn, with technology?
• What assemblages of people, things, technologies etc do
they create, and why?
• Do they feel that they can use technology to do what they
need?
• Is technology associated with new struggles?

• What should we learn from this, if we want to understand or
even intervene in learning?

• Project claims:
• 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.

• A new IT Strategy was proposed
• Staff response was mixed
• A response was generated
• Changes were made to committee structures
• What was the role of the project in this?
• How did we effect particular changes?

• The point of departure: the review document as stable
network
• ―The report […] pulls together the outcomes of stakeholder
and […] staff meetings. The proposed programme of
change has also been informed by discussions with third
party organisations and advice from the UCISA IT
Directors group.‖
• Problematization: the author as obligatory passage
point, framing the problem and people
• Staff, students, consultants, external experts enrolled
• What happens when enrolled actors ‗rebel‘?

• Staff expressed concerns, de-stabilising the network
• Technical staff and academic staff
• Questions about some of the evidence, implications
and recommendations
• ―Un-enrolling‖: re-problematizing the situation
• Specifically, who had been consulted, and how their
views shaped the report?
(Had this been productive interessement? Was it
something else?)

• Competing problematizations
• Old framing challenged
• A new framing emerged: problem raised with a senior
member of staff, with responsibility for aspects of learning
and teaching strategy; no longer about the systems per se
but their fitness for a wider purpose
• Competing translations
• Old framing: people as spoken for, on the basis of expert
experience
• New framing: people need to go on speaking, since their
needs develop as situations change

• Competing interessement
• ―Service users‖ as recipients of a better service
(with ‗better‘ appearing to be defined by experts)
• ―Service users‖ as determinants of what counts as a better
service (to then be implemented by experts) – power of
strategic decision-making moved from within the service to a
joint responsibility with actors outside
• Competing enrolment
• ―stakeholder and […] staff meetings‖
• Project research and consultation by the SU

WHO WAS ENROLLED AND HOW?
• Successful stabilisation required enrolment of students
• Our project formed part of this process
• Student experience(s) inscribed and mobilised in different ways
• Analysis of institutional survey data, with a specific focus on
experiences of technology
• Students already enrolled in this process
• Students translated as sources of evidence
• Evidence translated into survey responses (inscription)
• Survey responses translated into a report identifying issues
(further inscription)
• Survey report mobilised through comparison with strategy
document that identified inconsistencies

What shapes what? Technologies and their relationship to learning

• A series of focus groups with students
• Students translated to represent areas of teaching (PGCE,
taught masters, distance masters, PhD)
• Invited to shared experiences in return for vouchers
(interessement)
• Experiences shared and recorded, then transcribed
(inscription)
• Transcripts analysed to produce report (further inscription),
including recommendations – in particular, that student
needs were not homogenous but diverse
• Students therefore enrolled behind recommendations, with
project team as obligatory passage point, and mobilized via
report that could be circulated

• What did the new problematization look like?
• An undermining of the old problematization by reframing the
situation (from: is the service like others, to: is it fit for
purpose for our users?)
• A way of framing the specific report as historical, to focus on
ongoing interessement via systematic consultation: the
establishment of a User Group in the committee structure, to
include representation from the four groups of students we
worked with
• What did the project achieve?
• A shift of power: mobilizing students in support of the new
problematization, rather than the old

• The many metaphors relating technology and learning

• Driver • Residue, or even ossification
of practice
• Tsunami
• Reification
• Closed circuit
• Technical code/legislation
• Distributed system
• Network (which could be
• Envelope or space
heterogeneous)
• Market
• Generation of multiple realities

• Which, if any, help us? How? And with what limits?

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