Dialogic pedagogy and semiotic-dialogic inquiry into visual literacies and augmented reality

Technological determinism has been driving conceptions of technology enhanced learning for the last two decades at least. The abrupt shift to the emergency delivery of online courses during COVID-19 has accelerated big tech’s coup d’état of higher education, perhaps irrevocably. Yet, commercial technologies are not necessarily aligned with dialogic conceptions of learning while a technological transmission model negates learners’ input and interactions. Mikhail Bakhtin viewed words as the multivocal bridge to social thought. His theory of the polysemy of language, that has subsequently been termed dialogism, has strong correlations with the semiotic philosophy of American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce’s semiotic philosophy of signs extends far beyond words, speech acts, linguistics, literary genres, and/or indeed human activity. This study traces links between Bakhtin’s dialogism with Peirce’s semiotics. Conceptual synthesis develops the semiotic-dialogic framework. Taking augmented reality as a theoretical case, inquiry illustrates that while technologies are subsuming traditional pedagogies, teachers and learners, this does not necessarily open dialogic learning. This is because technologies are never dialogic, in and of themselves, although semiotic learning always involves social actors’ interpretations of signs. Crucially, semiotic-dialogism generates theorising of the visual literacies required by learners to optimise technologies for dialogic learning

Middle Eastern women influencers’ interdependent/independent subjectification on Tiktok: feminist postdigital transnational inquiry

Subjectification has been defined as the formation of the subject via discourses while social media bundles audio-visual discourses that afford subjectification. However, what is meant by the ‘subject’ is not neutral and subjectification can differ according to cultural context. This study takes Middle Eastern women influencers’ subjectification on TikTok as a case to illustrate postdigital transnational subjectification. The novel framework of feminist postdigital transnational inquiry is applied to the corpus assisted study of three Middle Eastern women influencers’ short-form TikTok videos. The findings reveal observable audio-visual elements while embedding conceptual meanings surrounding subjectification. Discussion postulates subjectification on TikTok as living postdigital practices with transnational meanings both within and beyond their immediate context. It is suggested that subjectification could occur beyond regional, generational, traditional, fixed or essentialist terms. Theorising offers nuanced insights into the curatorial potential of TikTok for subjectification as consecutively interdependent with contextual issues, trends and deeper traditional audio-visual ontologies. At the same time, it suggests that platforms’ transnational affordances in Global South contexts occur independently to Northcentric frameworks and interpretations

Thinking with semiotic-dialogism: Re-orientating augmented reality and visual literacy

Augmented reality (AR) apps, like Adobe’s Aero, enable users to turn Photoshop layers into interactive AR experiences and are considered promising for higher education. But what we see or do not see are mediated via histories, cultural values, ideologies, social practices and technologies. Simultaneously, the ways we receive knowledge, communicate and learn are more than ever being communicated via visual technologies. Yet, theories of visuality within educational research represent a longstanding gap within scholarship and theorising of visual technologies, including AR, is lacking. This study re-orientates conceptions of AR visual literacy through ‘thinking with’ semiotics, which is the study of signs, images, sounds or any phenomena communicating meaning (Peirce, 1908). Semiotics is synthesised with dialogism, defined as the exchange of texts, perspectives and voices (Bakhtin, 1986). The semiotic-dialogic framework is applied to a series of AR exhibits at Adobe’s (2020) Festival of the Impossible. The analysis re-orientates commercialised conceptions of AR pedagogy to reveal that, while AR experiences can be developed without coding knowledge, they still require visual literacies

Social Media Influencing in The City of Likes: Dubai and the Postdigital Condition

Providing a much-needed de-Westernising perspectives of Dubai\u27s social media influencing industry within the broader context of global platform capitalism, Zoe Hurley offers an important contribution to the field of social media through illustrating visible economies in a city circuited by social media influencing