Distance learning is promoting the adoption of several and new technological resources in
education. The Internet is a proof of this trend, providing students with the ability of accessing better
pedagogical contents from everywhere at anytime. This is usually supported by the so-called Virtual
Learning Environments (VLEs). However, the increase of the bandwidth together with improvements
in terms of the devices’ processing capabilities for accessing services/tools through the internet, has
contributed to the appearance of the Remote Experimentation (RE) concept. Currently adopted by
several Science and Engineering (S&E) courses, RE is classified as a sub-domain of E-learning and
as an extension of the traditional VLEs, since it provides all the facilities required for remotely
accessing laboratorial experiments, giving both students and teachers the ability to control real
experiments by using a simple device (e.g. PC, PDA, smart phone, etc.) connected to the internet.
Traditional (in-place) laboratorial experiments can now be remotely controlled with more flexibility,
reducing place and time restrictions usually present in a real laboratory. In addition, technological
evolution is contributing to many changes in several domains, which has alerted us to the importance
of contextualizing RE as a network of interconnected actors, with distinct characteristics and interests.
This represents a huge challenge that is fundamental to analyse, since society, and more particularly
the educational context, is faced with several unpredictable influences from technological innovations
that may contribute to the adoption of various educational solutions some of which may not have been
validated, particularly in S&E courses. Hence, this paper focuses on an analysis of RE based on the
Actor-Network Theory (ANT) in order to understand the existing relationships between human and
non-human (technological and/or conceptual) actors. The paper begins by contextualizing RE as an
actor-network in an intersection of several contexts, namely the social, technical and educational.
Further on, we map the actors and their associations. An analysis of the inclusion of a new actor into
the RE actor-network, namely FPGA-based boards for accommodating Instruments and Modules
(I&M), which are usually applied in remote laboratory infrastructures, is dealt with in the final section
of this paper.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
