'Curation’ as a new direction in digital literacy theory

This paper theorises the practices of curricular assignment writing. I approach the writing of assignments as an assemblage of digital literacies, emerging as learners use whatever tools – digital and otherwise – are to hand. Building on recent work in literacy studies, and using a sociomaterial approach, I theorise learners’ complex digital literacy practices emerging through their assignment writing. Importantly, some practices are in contrast to the digital demands imposed by normative classroom culture and policies, and others are related to how learners manage multitudes of resources, online and offline. I subsequently advance new directions in digital literacy theory as drawn from the data. One such idea is ‘curation’ as a digital literacy practice. I argue that understanding curation as a digital literacy practice adds value to current debates in digital literacy and educational technology, especially as researchers apply a more critical and fine-grained lens towards practices with educational technology

A sociomaterial account of assignment writing in Further Education classrooms

This PhD research explores assignment writing tasks in three separate Further Education classroom contexts. I approach the assignments as practical controversies as learners navigate their way through a course of study. Specifically, I attend to the ecology of digital literacy practices which emerge through the completion of the assignments by problematising the impact of cyberspace on classroom activities, as the learners undertake their work assisted by whatever digital media are to hand. I argue that connectivity of the Internet and deployment of digital media in classrooms contribute to emergent sociomaterial assemblages, or ‘actor-networks’, exploration and elucidation of which are key to understanding the literacy practices which instantiate them. This research addresses what these new sociomaterial assemblages look like, and the types of digital literacy practices arising from them. Drawing on recent work in Literacy Studies and actor-network theory, I uncover the complex and close relationship between the personal/informal literacy practices of learners and the digital demands imposed by normative classroom culture and policies. More broadly, I show that an assignment is an ‘assemblage’ which is tied together by political and managerial decisions, economic imperatives, teachers’ aims and practices, learner habits of use, material artefacts and their properties, etc. All of these agencies shape a certain choreography of digital literacy practices arising during classroom tasks; practices which can instantiate a tension between a normative classroom dramaturgy and a more anarchic learner bricolage. Findings of this research will inform policies on digital learning and benefit educational practice through in depth accounts of the digital habits and practices of learners’ life worlds, and how they align with classroom assignment tasks. By understanding learner practices it is possible to better understand digital innovations in education, the extent to which learners embrace or avoid imposed technologies, and how such practices re-shape assignments as evolving pedagogic forms

Capturing the sociomateriality of digital literacy events

This paper discusses a method of collecting and analysing multimodal data during classroom-based digital literacy research. Drawing on reflections from two studies, the authors discuss theoretical and methodological implications encountered in the collection, transcription and presentation of such data. Following an ethnomethodological framework that co-develops theory and methodology, the studies capture digital literacy activities as real-time screen recordings, with embedded video recordings of participants’ movements and vocalisations around the tasks during writing. The result is a multimodal rendition of digital literacy events on- and off-screen, allowing linguistic and multimodal transcriptions to capture the complexity of the data in a format amenable to analysis. Acquiring such data allowed for the development of detailed analyses of digital literacy events in the classroom, including interaction that would otherwise have escaped standard ethnography and video analysis, through sensibilities that approach social and material items without a priori hierarchies. This leads us to a ‘performative’ notion of digital literacies and an analytic methodology that is useful for researchers paying greater attention to the sociomaterial assemblages in which digital literacy events unfold

Teaching-led research?:Exploring the digital agencies of software in qualitative research

This work-in-progress paper explores the intersection of technologies and software with the practices, of qualitative research and qualitative data analysis. Computer aided qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS) packages such as ATLAS.ti, NVivo and HyperRESEARCH are the focus of competing claims and critiques. We explore the positioning, continuities and disjunctures between manufacturers promoting their software, positioning in teaching and training materials and a range of views in the literature from critical to laudatory, as well as their prevalence in research on networked learning. The pre-eminence and influence of expository writing and paucity of empirical research underscore the relevance and potential contribution of this project, We argue that part of that contribution comes from drawing on insights from science and technology studies (STS) which offer a well-developed vocabulary and set of approaches for exploring the agencies and mediation of technologies in the practices of research. The initial stages of the research project are outlined including online participant recruitment via facebook, methods of screen-share remote interviewing to generate rich data exploring software use, and incorporating accounts of researchers’ practices. Their transformation and mediation to become “data” through different software packages are briefly explored. Drawing on Latour’s model of the two-faced Janus of science with which contrasts “science in the making" with “ready made science” we turn to consider ways in which this project can invert the usual trope of University education as research led, asking instead how a research project could become teaching-led. We briefly explore some of the initial approaches and opportunities this has created for opening up the black-box of research practices and shifting software training methods to engage learners in a process of discovery as “learning in the making” rather than being tasked with stepping through fixed frames of “ready made teaching”

'Historians don’t set out to change people’s lives’:to what extent are notions of social justice shared across the academy

This paper reports on the first phase of an ESRC-funded research project aimed at exploring how knowledge is produced and distributed through the writing practices of academics, and how these are shaped by the contemporary context of higher education, including managerialism, and research assessment. As part of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and to secure funding from research councils, academics are expected to demonstrate that their work has economic or social impact beyond academia. This 'impact agenda' is one of the ways in which scholarly research may engage with the notion of social justice. However, impact may be more complex in nature than is accounted for in research assessment exercises, and may be interpreted in different ways across different disciplines, with some lending themselves to social justice more readily than others. The data presented in this paper draws on interviews with academics at three different universities and in three disciplinary areas: Mathematics, History and Marketing. We discuss how they interpret policies requiring them to demonstrate economic and social impact, and how this interacts with their views on the wider role of academics in society. The findings of the project indicate that there is no unified notion of social justice across the disciplines, and that understandings of this concept, including how easily it can be achieved and the extent to which it is prioritised by the institution, influence the choices academics make in their writing practices. For example, although many of our participants talked about the importance of making their research accessible or “making a difference”, the perceived beneficiaries of this included commercial companies and government agencies. Some interpreted impact in terms of financial transparency, seeing this as a form of social justice towards students or taxpayers. Academic discipline emerged as a complicating factor in understandings of serving society, with impact being seen as more difficult to achieve in some disciplines than others. Furthermore, efforts to engage in social justice-related activities were also at times compromised by competing priorities such as demands on participants’ time. Overall, the findings indicate that the valued forms of knowledge creation in the working lives of our participants are complex and contested. The ways in which social justice is conceptualised by our participants and how it serves as a driver for the choices they make, interact with their disciplinary traditions, their career stage, and personal priorities, as well as how they interpret policy on impact

Diving deep into digital literacy:emerging methods for research

Literacy studies approaches have tended to adopt a position which enables ethnographic explorations of a wide range of ‘literacies’. An important issue arising is the new challenge required for researchers to capture, manage, and analyse data that highlight the unique character of practices around texts in digital environments. Such inquiries, we argue, require multiple elements of data to be captured and analysed as part of effective literacy ethnographies. These include such things as the unfolding of digital texts, the activities around them, and features of the surrounding social and material environment. This paper addresses these methodological issues drawing from three educationally focused studies, and reporting their experiences and insights within uniquely different contexts. We deal with the issue of adopting new digital methods for literacy research through the notion of a ‘deep dive’ to explore educational tasks in classrooms. Through a discussion of how we approached the capture and analysis of our data, we present methods to better understand digital literacies in education. We then outline challenges posed by our methods, how they can be used more broadly for researching interaction in digital environments, and how they augment transdisciplinary debates and trends in research methods

Dissolving the dichotomies between online and campus-based teaching: a collective response to The manifesto for teaching online (Bayne et al. 2020)

This article is a collective response to the 2020 iteration of The Manifesto for Teaching Online. Originally published in 2011 as 20 simple but provocative statements, the aim was, and continues to be, to critically challenge the normalization of education as techno-corporate enterprise and the failure to properly account for digital methods in teaching in Higher Education. The 2020 Manifesto continues in the same critically provocative fashion, and, as the response collected here demonstrates, its publication could not be timelier. Though the Manifesto was written before the Covid-19 pandemic, many of the responses gathered here inevitably reflect on the experiences of moving to digital, distant, online teaching under unprecedented conditions. As these contributions reveal, the challenges were many and varied, ranging from the positive, breakthrough opportunities that digital learning offered to many students, including the disabled, to the problematic, such as poor digital networks and access, and simple digital poverty. Regardless of the nature of each response, taken together, what they show is that The Manifesto for Teaching Online offers welcome insights into and practical advice on how to teach online, and creatively confront the supremacy of face-to-face teaching