Looking for black cats and lessons from Charlie: exploring the potential of public click pedagogy
Chris Bigum, Griffith Institute for Educational Research, Griffith University, Leonie Rowan, Griffith Institute for Educational Research, Griffith University, Mary Hamilton, Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University, Steve Wright, Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University, Ailsa Haxell, School of Interprofessional Health Studies, Faculty of Health and Environmental Sciences, Auckland University of Technology
This paper is about a slow hunch. A hunch that a modest interference in networked learning, that we have called public click pedagogy (PCP), may, in some instances, usefully open up a side of networked learning that is often glossed. Learning new material, developing new skills, making new discoveries can be complicated, and messy. Few of us go from inexperienced to skilled or novice to master in anything like a simple, tidy or routine manner. We often learn more from our mistakes than our successes. We sometimes find ourselves in blind alleys or chasing down rabbit holes that appear to take us nowhere.
What learners actually do when they try to come to terms with a new domain via formal or informal means, tends to be secret learner business. What is commonly made visible is how successful they are in coming to terms with the domain, something which is judged by people who have demonstrated knowledge and expertise in the domain. Our hunch is that a modest exploration of secret learner business by making public the fuzzy, pragmatic and messy business of learning may work as a useful complement to those elements of learning already made public. The label PCP draws attention to three characteristics of this work: that it is made public, that ‘aha’ or click moments which in a glossed account masquerade as the product of acute insight are traced carefully, and that accounts of these practices may operate pedagogically, for the learner, and perhaps, other learners.
To explore the doing of networked learning we draw parallels with the doing of science as it has been studied by scholars in the field of science, technology, and society (STS). Looking at how scientists actually do science, STS scholars came to see that accounts of science as products of the scientific method glossed the messiness, noncoherence and fuzziness of what went on in the laboratory. To Bruno Latour, in the early days of STS, science was Janus-like, with two contradictory faces: science in the making and ready made science. More recently, John Law with others have extended this line of argument to examine the performativity of noncoherence.
Drawing on this work, we examine three empirical cases, one of which is the preparation of this paper. We trace the negotiation of the ideas and arguments, our learning in the making, and the noncoherences which we partially domesticate through dialogue.
Keywords
Public click pedagogy, actor-network theory, learning in the making, ready made learning
Assembling university learning technologies for an open world: connecting institutional and social networks
John Hannon, La Trobe Learning and Teaching, La Trobe University, Matthew Riddle, La Trobe Learning and Teaching, La Trobe University, Thomas Ryberg, Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University
This paper considers the emergence of social media in university teaching and learning and the capacity or universities – as complex organisations with disparate interacting parts – to respond to the shift of pedagogies and practices to open networks. Institutional learning technology environments reflect a legacy of prescriptive, hierarchical arrangements associated with enterprise systems, and are a poor fit with the heterarchical and self-organised potential for learning associated with social media and open education practices. In this paper we focus on the tensions that arise from the juxtaposition of these two orientations to learning technologies, and focus on how an emerging online sociality can destabilise established boundaries of learning and connect to other domains of practice. To do this, we examined data from three separate case studies in which participants - both teaching staff and students - reported on student engagement in learning involving social networking activity. We draw on empirical data on student practices that challenge institutional arrangements for learning, and offer insights into the assembly of extended connections for networked learning, in particular the pedagogies of collaboration, knowledge co-construction, and informal social learning. From these instances we draw attention to the interplay of competing metaphors and practices in the organisation as it encounters the potential of more open pedagogies over social and digital networks. Drawing on spatial descriptions of networked learning, we apply Callon’s (1998) notions of framing and overflows to this interplay in order to ask how learning environments were assembled and ordered: what pre-existing configurations were brought to frame and set boundaries for these networks of formal learning; and what activities overflow those boundaries and destabilise these framings. We argue that the adoption of social media by students requires a challenge to the institutional metaphors of containment that implement a default bounded environment. This involves a reappraisal of established learning environments for their pedagogical metaphors and spatial orderings that frame learning, followed by different organisational approaches to account for and enact learning that emerges from the connections, mobilities and flows of social networks. We propose a less integrated, “assembly” approach to institutional learning that attends to the open, fluid connections of networked learning. A spatial articulation of networked learning that bridges both institutional and social networks can equip the university to meet the critical challenges of emerging hybrid learning environments and the potential of more open learning environments.
Keywords
social media, learning, Web 2.0, spatial, metaphors, self-organisation, socio-material, assemblage, framing, overflows.
Xploring txtuality & txtually transmitd dis-Ez: Exploring textuality & textually transmitted dis-ease
Ailsa Haxell, School of Interprofessional Health Studies, Auckland University of Technology, School of Education, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia
In studying the sociology of translation, there is logic in attempting to stay as true to form as possible in reporting on studies, for what is known is that in the performance of reporting, further translations occur. Furthermore, additional and perhaps unnecessary distortions occur when the research is disseminated. Taking a performative turn, research dissemination attends to more than the aesthetic. In investigating how young people become positioned in their preference for texting, what is shown is positioning that trivializes, pathologizes and marginalizes. In only attending to a sanitized voice, one made to fit the academic audience, translated into the discourse of those situated in the mainstream, processes of colonization and oppression are perpetuated. In giving academic credence to particular voices and not others, conventions of academia support a dominant discourse: "to be taken seriously do not stay as you are". This paper therefore focuses on a particular aspect of research, the collateral damage of research dissemination that restricts and alters voice. To redress violence against such voices, a performative turn is taken.
This paper explores textuality and textual dis-ease as a dialogically provocative texted performance. I present text language as non-trivial and non-pathological. In presenting this research my intention is not to provide a spectator’s view on some private world, nor to entertain, but to engage with you in a performance that runs interference on conventions that would marginalize and oppress. In doing so, a sociology of translation provokes understanding not only of things both technical and social, but also political; of practice realities involving those “othered” and perhaps better understanding of how we too may be “othering”.
Keywords
Sociology of translation, performative turn, textuality
The Power of Theory: An Actor-Network Critique of Aha! Moments and Doctoral Learner Empowerment
Jeffrey M. Keefer, Visiting Nurse Service of New York / New York University
Doctoral studies can be envisioned as a journey to prepare novice researchers or expert practitioners to produce an original contribution to a field or engage in disciplinary stewardship. The focus is often upon the individual’s individuality in production, and not about challenges or supports encountered along the way that lead to those achievements. Many postgraduates struggle in achieving these contributions, and while sometimes they are rather public in nature, quite often they involve private battles that are confronted and won, or lost, in solitude. However, stewardship and originality do not necessitate isolation, and in the same way that ideas commonly generate in reaction and relation to other ideas, so too does the role of support structures within doctoral studies when they are most needed. While other people in the lives of the doctoral learner—supervisors, friends, family—are readily recognized as the support network, less is known about the network of things, especially the influential role that theory plays, in the lives of postgraduates. It is this very theory that has the power to help the learner work through the troublesome periods en route to achieving the doctorate.
This study engaged an actor-network critique of the power of theory in the lives of doctoral students to explore how the notion of translation can provide insights into understanding how liminal periods, those challenging times where one is no longer the initiate but not yet the expert in one’s field or discipline, can be resolved (Kiley, 2009). Using Callon’s (1986) four-part schema of translation—problematization, interessement, enrolment, and mobilization—the role of theory in doctoral learning was examined within the context of a study of 23 international and interdisciplinary doctoral learners to better understand how theory itself exhibited power to support the journey through troublesome periods when no other support was available or strong enough to suffice. The result was the experience of aha! moments of theoretical clarity and appreciation, with an unexpected power for these non-human actors to resolve the liminal periods and support postgraduates with confidence as they completed their journeys.
Keywords
Doctoral Student, Postgraduate, Doctoral Liminality, Actor-Network Theory, ANT, Narrative Inquiry
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Performing Blended Learning as a Product and a Service
Cormac O'Keefe, Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University, Gale Parchoma, Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary
Blended and networked learning discourses tend to focus on relations among learners, tutor/professor/teachers, peers, and material learning resources. While in higher educational contexts there is logic to this discursive practice, the roles of non-educator and technological actants in blended learning networks are often neglected or relegated to marginal positions. Non-educators’ contributions to commercial assemblages of blended learning networks can be perceived as out-sider performances, in which values are more aligned to neo-liberal, managerial practices. The roles of technological actants across contexts remain under theorised. We trace interactions among sales and service staff, technological actors, and learners in a commercial blended learning assemblage and problematise a commodified performance of blended learning in relation to blended and networked learning theorised practices. Using Callon’s notion of socio-technical capacities and assemblages, we redeploy attributes of a blended-learning network where interactions among sales and service staff, learners, technological artefacts and actants are described. The roles sales and service staff and technological agents in a second language enterprise perform blended learning as an assemblage that binds companies, human personnel, and learners. Using this approach, informed by material-semiotics, we follow the sequence of transformations that are involved in the production, distribution, and consumption of blended learning. Non-educator and non-human actants in sales, service, and administrative roles actively work to strengthen blended learning assemblages, making them more - or less - durable over time, while having little or nothing to do with supporting cooperative or collaborative learning activities central to theorised blended and network learning practices. Yet these actants perform key roles in performing blended learning as a product and a service in commercial settings that connect theories of blended learning.
Keywords
networked learning, blended learning, material-semiotics, performativity, commodification
Testing Tasting: methods assemblages in an online exam
Steve Wright, Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University
This paper explores the historical contingencies and networks of relations enacted in the Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) online exam, designed “to test a prospective judge’s knowledge of beer styles, beer characteristics and the brewing process”. Drawing on the work of John Law the exam is considered as a methods assemblage crafting presences, manifest absences and othered realities. Using accounts from auto-ethnographic recordings and ethnographic fieldwork together with documents, I trace associations from the exam questions and the way they use language to compare beer styles and descriptions. I consider the historical development of these methods of description through the work of Shapin (2012) who explores how these are connected to historic shifts in the way taste, and the tasting body, was understood in the late 18th to early 19th centuries and the orphaning of taste from scientific practice. I then examine how this shift opened changes from a sparse to ornate vocabulary to described the tasted object and the ways that this vocabulary has developed both in connection and in contrast the language of wine. I turn to consider efforts to create devices that standardise this vocabulary and their use for purposes of beer judging in the BJCP. I ask whether the ways that bodies, objects and devices are described and related can be considered to assemble a "community of amateurs" as suggested by Hennion (2004, 2007). I suggest that the reflexive accounts of the participant organisation in describing this as a "program" are more appropriate than the term community. I conclude by considering what contribution an engagement with the concept of a methods assemblage can make to the discussions around tasting and the BJCP, and the broader potentials for networked learning research.
Keywords
Craft beer, actor-network theory, beer judging, sensory assessment, online assessment.
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