critiquing digital dualism: a sociomaterial account of student entanglements with technologies Lesley Gourlay & Martin OliverInstitute of Education@lesleygourlay #TtW13 #d2

overviewdigital mediation and textual practicesproblems with dualismmultimodal journalling findings

‘the university’ is enacted through day-to-day entanglements clustered around texts

texts and semiotic practices are elided in contemporary accounts of the university, rendered transparent, ‘innocent’ repositories, stripped of situatedness, materiality and embodiment

textual practices in the university are saturated with digital mediation, entanglements with devices, and hybrid domains

Material campus saturated with digital mediationStatus of ‘face-to-face’ placed in radical doubt (Gourlay 2012)Posthuman (Hayles 1999) nature of meaning-making practices

Reflexive relationship between textual media and knowledge practices in higher education (Kittler 2004)Need to explore ramifications of devices & digitally mediated semiotic practices on meaning making

sociomaterial perspectivesActor Network Theory (e.g. Latour 2005) Sociomateriality (e.g. Fenwick et al 2011).

‘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)

the study 2-year UK government-funded project http://diglitpga.jiscinvolve.org/

1st year: student research

Focus groups

Longitudinal multimodal journalling

2nd year: implementation projects

Staff longitudinal journalling

Changes to structures and systems

Spaces, places and times• Making, not just finding,

places for study‘Digital literacies’ as coping strategy

• Managing the separation and integration of personal, professional and study placesEmail accounts

Printers in schools

Social networks etc

Too close for comfort

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.

A library transformed

Materiality, ephemerality, digitisation, inscription, mobility

‘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 Interview 1)

Yuki’s booksFrom print to digital and back again

“The bathroom is a good place to read”

Too close for comfort, or close enough to be comfortable?

Digitally connected texts in a very embodied setting – neither ‘virtual’ nor ‘real’ (Jurgenson 2012)

implicationsUndermines ‘common sense’ binaries of user/device and material/virtualDestabilises notions of single, stable, human authorship and agencyNeed for theoretical development to account for posthuman semiotic practices and subjectivities in education

Fenwick, T., Edwards, R. & Sawchuck, P. (2011). Emerging Approaches of Educational Research: Tracing the Sociomaterial. London: Routledge.

Gourlay, L. (2012) 'Cyborg ontologies and the lecturer's voice: a posthuman reading of the 'face-to-face', Learning, Media and Technology 37 (2), 198-211.

Hayles, N. (1999). How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. London: University of Chicago Press.

JISC (2012) Digital Literacies as a Postgraduate Attribute? http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/developingdigitalliteracies/DigLitPGAttribute.aspx [Accessed 30 June 2012]

Kittler, F. (2004). Universities: wet, hard, soft, and harder. Critical Enquiry 31(1): 244-255.

Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.