Actor Network Theory and adult education

The things and objects that help to enact and animate everyday work and learning practices are often ignored, dismissed or subordinated. Surfacing the materialities of practices is one appeal of theoretical perspectives such as Actor Network Theory (ANT). Situating ANT in the current theory landscape I will discuss the sociomaterial turn and highlight key conceptual contributions of ANT. I conclude by exploring the relevance of ANT to adult/continuing education and lifelong learning researchers, practitioners, and policy makers

The uncodings of ANT: Mobilities of digital data

One of the basic tenets of Actor Network Theory (ANT) is to "follow the actors". However, coded materialities (the digital in all its forms, including software, devices, networks, artefacts, and algorithms) are notoriously fickle. Digital things are often described as unbounded, evasive, distributed, and constantly mutating (Kallinikos, Aaltonen & Marton, 2010). Indeed, the web, as portrayed by Czerski (2012), seems to simply exist as flow. So how do networked learning researchers reckon with these mobilities and multiplicities? As a form of posthumanist theorizing, ANT-inspired researchers attend to how the assemblings of "thingly gatherings" co-constitute enactments of everyday practices with, in, around, and through human actors. Therefore, ANT seems to offer an ontological questioning and framing that can engage with the fluidity of the digital. In this short paper (and Pecha Kucha presentation), I call on ANT to explore how the digital interposes data within the research process—freezing, thawing, excluding, including—beckoning researchers to attend to the sociality of data. The discussion that follows the presentation will draw on real-time examples from the other papers in this symposium to explore the mobilities of digital data. In moving to a posthuman framing, data—a blackboxed materiality of research projects—becomes much more complex. A sociomaterial reading of data suggests it is a relational effect: becoming in a particular moment because of juxtapositions of multiple networks. Such a conceptualization of data raises several questions. First, how does one theorize the role of the digital in the production of social data and the research process? Second, the encoding of data has amplified its mobility and performativity: it is distributed, often public, fragmented, and entangled in multiple recursive circulations. It takes on new forms and energies. Tensions become apparent, for example as dynamic digital data, at home in the wilderness of the web, is translated to the archived (or frozen) data that appears in screen captures or pdf journal articles. Here, the mobility and fluidity of data (the state of always becoming and creating ongoing movements in understanding) wrestles with practices of solidifying data (freezing or tethering: settling down and settling into a particular locality). This tension provides one entry point for examining the mobilities and socialities of data

The making of mobilities in online work-learning practices

In this study of mobilities of work-learning practices, I draw on sociomaterial theorizing to explore how the everyday work and learning practices of contingent workers are changing through the infusion of web and mobile technologies. I use Ingold’s notions ofbecomingandmeshworkand Law’s work oncollateral realitiesto explore curation of screens, different flows of mobilities and the importance of place to enact work-learning practices that move and mobilize. This study suggests that the making of mobilities is a fluid and provisional process that asks for a more thoughtful and critical posthuman reckoning with human–technology interactions on learning practices and spaces. I conclude with implications of these shifts in new mobilities of work-learning for workers and educators

(Re/dis)assembling learning practices online with fluid objects and spaces

Actor Network Theory (ANT) is used to explore how work-learning is enacted in informal online communities and illustrates how researchers might use sociomaterial approaches to uncover complexities, uncertainties, and specificities of work-learning practices. Participants in this study were self-employed workers. The relational and material aspects of work-learning, along with notions of the workspace of the self-employed as hybrid, distributed, and shifting, are considered. This study then examines the work that web-technologies, such as postings, do as they are entangled in an array of networks. Far from being singular objects unified in function, form, or effect, the posting provides multiple entry points for exploring online work-learning practices. The informal learning enacted in this study was the effect of multiple networks and attempts to stabilize fluidity. Different associations with knowledge and novel ways of knowing were also enacted, although there are contradictions between Web2.0 rhetoric and the practices of these self-employed workers. Findings suggest that practitioners and researchers should not be too quick to paint work-learning practices in online communities, or even the notion of online community, with a broad brush

Mobile work-learning: Spatial re-orderings and digital fluencies

This short paper (and Pecha Kucha presentation) explores new mobilities and spatial re-orderings of adult work-learning practices. Attention is given to the more sophisticated digital fluencies that seem to be demanded of adult work-learners and the pedagogical implications for educators. Sociomaterial perspectives encourage thinking about how “thingly gatherings” serve in the performance of practice. The unbounded blurry nature of the web and its artefacts can perhaps be described as fluid spaces enfolding with other fluid spaces. Thus, web-based spaces are not containers in which online learning activities take place but rather sociomaterial assemblages that take on particular energies as people and things—both online and offline—negotiate how they move, mix, and mobilize in their correspondences. Analysis draws on empirical data from a research project that explored the effects of the infusion of web and mobile technologies in the enactment of the global work and everyday learning practices of the contingent workforce (the self-employed or micro-small business entrepreneurs). An array of mobilities became evident in these practices, including interactions that slide in, through, and between different cyberspaces; the persistent infusion of the digital and physical into the other; and often capricious and vacillating patterns of presence and absence. However, alongside the mobilities that become evident in these practices, immobilities were also prominent. Using the sociality of practices around mobile devices as an entry point to explore this contradiction, it seems that forces and flows of mobilities are also tied to specificities of place. Although the physical becomes entangled with the digital to enact a specific work-learning space, such spatial re-orderings are not always easily accomplished. Moreover, the often overlooked and invisible spatial negotiations evoked to enact mobility unfold in multiple work-learning places: at home, on the move, in third spaces, at the office, field-based temporary work sites, and innumerable online spaces. This multiplicity adds complexity to how work-learning spaces are conceptualized. Several digital fluencies (a mix of expertise, responsibility, criticality, and innovation) emerge, urging pedagogical and policy response. Four will be highlighted: navigating scale, negotiating openness, wayfinding (Siemens, 2011), and fragmenting-tethering. How to wor k through the challenges of addressing these fluencies and how best to interrupt current practices are questions facing both educators and adult worker-learners and I hope this paper prompts such discussion

The unConference Toolkit

The unConference Toolkit was developed in preparation for the inaugural Digital Youth & Learning unConference hosted by Digital Opportunity Trust (DOT; dotrust.org) in Nairobi, Kenya in May 2013. We believed an unConference approach could disrupt traditional perceptions of what happens at a knowledge exchange. It is thought that blending research, theory, practice, and policy discourses can lead to more participatory knowledge creation as well as more research savvy organizations, such as DOT's. Knowledge exchanges are seen as one way to accomplish this goal. However, this can be challenging to achieve. And so, with this challenge in mind, DOT set out to conceptualize and deliver a more innovative approach to such exchanges and knowledge mobilization, particularly within a global context: an unConference. Drawing on leading-edge research (focused on ICT, youth, gender, learning and pedagogy, and entrepreneurship) as a catalyst, DOT hosted an unConference focused on changing the way researchers, youth beneficiaries, practitioners, and policy makers interact with knowledge and building a network of like minded individuals to create economic, education, and entrepreneurial opportunities in East Africa. Although unConferences have been around for several decades, they are only now finding their way into more research-informed knowledge sharing events. As we, and our colleagues in East Africa, embarked on this unConference project we struggled to find relevant resources to help us design this event. This toolkit reflects an amalgam of resources we both found and innovated. We hope it will be helpful to others considering a more organic and participatory approach to sharing and mobilizing knowledge.The website where this toolkit is hosted may be undergoing maintenance and the page unavailable. If so, the toolkit is available in STORRE. Click the full text link or STORRE handle to access. http://education.ok.ubc.ca/research/innovative-learning-centre/The_unConference_Toolkit.htm

Report on the Digital and Youth Learning unConference and Scholar Knowledge Exchange

Integrating ICTs into development programs is complex. Although research can inform decisions made by practitioners as they embed new technologies into learning and work strategies, the synergies between research, practice, knowledge, and learning are not always fluid. Digital Opportunity Trust (DOT), a Canadian-based international social enterprise, designed an innovative approach to address these tensions: The Digital Youth & Learning unConference. This project may help conceptualize more innovative approaches towards knowledge exchange and prompt critical re-thinking of scholarship and knowledge generation, particularly within a global context. African and Canadian scholars, alongside DOT’s youth beneficiaries, global and regional staff, donors, and local and Canadian partners worked to increase research and learning capacity within DOT and its extended network, deepen and widen contributions to key development issues, and generate new collaboration modes. African-based research focused on ICT, youth, gender, learning and pedagogy, and entrepreneurship served as a catalyst. Outcomes include: an innovative re-usable approach to multi-sectoral knowledge exchange, the development of an online model and platform to support an unConference format, and increased capacity within the NGO to engage with the research community. This report outlines the main activities of this project as well as key learnings and important questions this project raises for future research and knowledge exchange initiatives

A more-than-human approach to researching AI at work: Alternative narratives for AI and networked learning

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly manifest in everyday work, learning, and living. Reports attempting to gauge public perception suggest that amidst exaggerated expectations and fears about AI, citizens are sceptical and lack understanding of what AI is and does (Archer et al., 2018). Professional workers practice at the intersection of such public perceptions, the AI industry, and regulatory frameworks. Yet, there is limited understanding of the day-to-day interactions and predicaments between workers, AI systems, and the publics they serve. This includes how these interactions and predicaments generate opportunities for learning and highlight new digital fluencies needed. We bring social and computing science perspectives to begin to examine the prevailing AI narratives in professional work and learning practices. Some AIs (such as deep machine learning systems) are so sophisticated that a human-understandable explanation of how it works may not be possible. This raises questions about what professional practitioners are able to know about the AI systems they use: their new digital co-workers. We argue that a co-constitutive human-AI perspective could provide useful insights on questions such as: (1) How is professional expertise and judgment re-distributed as workers negotiate and learn with AI systems? (2) What trust and confidence in new AI-infused work practices is needed or possible and how is this mediated? (3) What are the implications for professional learning: both learning within work and the workplace and more formal curriculum? Given the early stages of this field of inquiry, our aim is to evoke discussion of alternative human-AI narratives suited for the messy—and often unseen—realities of everyday practices

Interviewing the digital materialities of posthuman inquiry: Decoding the encoding of research practices

Have you considered how the many things assisting you with your research—digital recorders, computer assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS) or even Google Scholar—may also be silently shaping scholarly practices? In this paper, we interrogate the networked, digital landscape of everyday qualitative research practices by unraveling several examples taken from recent empirical studies in educational and social science. Our disentangling and decoding of the digital materialities of qualitative inquiry involves "interviewing" several digital objects—a recording device, a digital camera, an iPod, and a software program—that were recruited at different stages of several contemporary research projects. We deploy Adams and Thompson’s (2011) heuristics for interviewing nonhuman or "thingly" research participants, and apply these to the digital things of qualitative research practices. We suggest that these digital entities—"coded materialities" —participate as co-researchers that transform, extend and support but also deform, disrupt and circumscribe research practice and knowledge construction, and inevitably introduce new tensions and contradictions. Counterpointing two approaches to describing our enacted and pre-objective material worlds—Actor Network Theory and phenomenology, we usher into view some of the hidden and coded materialities of research practice, and glimpse unexpected realities enacted. Such immersive entanglements ultimately raise new questions about the posthumanist fluencies demanded in social science research practice. One such fluency is reckoning with how our agency as researchers is increasing shared, distributed and supported by digital technologies. Our entanglements with coded materialities introduce new ethical tensions and responsibilities into research practice. Second, new fluencies may also be called into play as the researcher’s work is subject to both deskilling and up-skilling as various technologies sit alongside researchers as co-researchers. Third, when data is viewed as lively, relational and mobile, new enactments of data are possible. Learning to work with these complex data circulations is another posthuman research digital fluency. Fourth, the scale, mobility, and spatial arrangements of the research process are being radically reconfigured as increasingly public and fragmented; these new arrangements bring both tensions and opportunities to be. Finally, with data being frozen and thawed in the fluidity of digitized research spaces, researchers must be attentive to how and what data is being included and excluded. We conclude by suggesting that researchers "build in" opportunities to regularly query the digital tools of their trade

Structure, content, delivery, service, and outcomes: Quality e-Learning in higher education

This paper addresses the need for quality e-Learning experiences. We used the Demand-Driven Learning Model (MacDonald, Stodel, Farres, Breithaupt, and Gabriel, 2001) to evaluate an online Masters in Education course. Multiple data collection methods were used to understand the experiences of stakeholders in this case study: the learners, design team, and facilitators. We found that all five dimensions of the model (structure, content, delivery, service, and outcomes) must work in concert to implement a quality e-Learning course. Key themes include evolving learner needs, the search for connection, becoming an able e-participant, valued interactions, social construction of content, integration of delivery partners, and mindful weighing of benefits and trade-offs. By sharing insights into what is needed to design and deliver an e-Learning experience, our findings add to the growing knowledge of online learning. Using this model to evaluate perceptions of quality by key stakeholders has led to insights and recommendations on the Demand Driven Learning Model itself which may be useful for researchers in this area and strengthen the model