Transcript
Page 1: Oliver & Gourlay Keynote EdTech Conference NUI Maynooth 2012

Un-defining digital literacies:students’ day-to-day engagements with technologies

Martin Oliver & Lesley Gourlay Institute of Education, University of London

EdTech Conference 2012NUI Maynooth31st May 2012

Image or text to go here

Page 2: Oliver & Gourlay Keynote EdTech Conference NUI Maynooth 2012

Overview

1) Literacies as social practice

2) Literacies as situated practices

3) Literacies as distributed and diffuse

2

Page 3: Oliver & Gourlay Keynote EdTech Conference NUI Maynooth 2012

Literacies as social practice

3

Page 4: Oliver & Gourlay Keynote EdTech Conference NUI Maynooth 2012

Definitions of digital literacies

Digital literacy defines those capabilities which fit an individual for living, learning and working in a digital society.

(Beetham, 2010)

• Is having a definition “a convenient hypocrisy”?

4

Page 5: Oliver & Gourlay Keynote EdTech Conference NUI Maynooth 2012

Conceptions of literacies

• Ethnographic research (Brice-Heath 1983, Street 1984)

• Social practice not individual cognition

• Academic literacies (Lea & Street, 1998)

• Critique of cognitive, individual model

• Focus on meaning-making and texts

5

Page 6: Oliver & Gourlay Keynote EdTech Conference NUI Maynooth 2012

Learning technology

Many theories of “learning” but not good explanation of “technology”

Literature search• Decade of journals in the field• Only 10 articles in a decade that try to explain

“technology”• Five of them about “affordances”

Page 7: Oliver & Gourlay Keynote EdTech Conference NUI Maynooth 2012

Technology “offers” (causes) or constrains • A way of designing user agency out• Appealing to designers who want users to behave• Cf. Woolgar & Grint (1997) and “configuring the users” (an

STS take on the problem)• Vendor rhetoric of technology “solutions”

Seeking approaches that don’t reduce ‘the social’ to a ‘command and control’ systems/engineering paradigm

7

Page 8: Oliver & Gourlay Keynote EdTech Conference NUI Maynooth 2012

Literacies as situated practice

8

Page 9: Oliver & Gourlay Keynote EdTech Conference NUI Maynooth 2012

IOE JISC project

2-year funded project– http://diglitpga.jiscinvolve.org/– Digital Literacies programme, 10 projects

1st year: student research • Focus groups• Longitudinal multimodal journalling

2nd year: implementation projects

9

Page 10: Oliver & Gourlay Keynote EdTech Conference NUI Maynooth 2012

Methodology

Reflecting diversity, complexity etc

Data as close as possible to practices, not accounts of practices

Journalling as ethnographically informed data of

Artefacts – emphasis on experience over abstraction, sense of the fine-grained day-to-day lived practices

10

Page 11: Oliver & Gourlay Keynote EdTech Conference NUI Maynooth 2012

11

Page 12: Oliver & Gourlay Keynote EdTech Conference NUI Maynooth 2012

12

Page 13: Oliver & Gourlay Keynote EdTech Conference NUI Maynooth 2012

What did the focus groups say about situated practice?

13

Page 14: Oliver & Gourlay Keynote EdTech Conference NUI Maynooth 2012

What do our students use?Lots of things - many institutional, but also many that are not institutionally supported

• Office tools (primarily Microsoft, plus Google docs and Prezi)• Institutional VLEs (Moodle and Blackboard)• Email (institutional, personal and work-based)• Synchronous conferencing services (Skype, Elluminate)• Calendars (iCal, Google)• Search engines and databases (including Google, Google Scholar, library databases,

professional databases such as Medline, etc),• Social networking sites (Facebook, Academia.edu, LinkedIn) and services (Twitter)• Image editing software (photoshop, lightbox)• Endnote• Reference works (Wikipedia, online dictionaries and social bookmarking sites such as

Mendeley)• GPS services• Devices (PCs at the institution and at home, laptops including MacBooks, iPhones, iPads,

Blackberries and E-book readers).

14

Page 15: Oliver & Gourlay Keynote EdTech Conference NUI Maynooth 2012

“The student experience”No evidence that the student experience is singular…•Marked differences in experiences and priorities across the four groups•PGCE, MA students, PhD students, Online masters’ students•Coping with whiteboards and staff room politics of access; using the VLE to access materials; library databases; using the VLE to create a sense of community (…and Skype behind the scenes…)•Professional, personal, study

15

Page 16: Oliver & Gourlay Keynote EdTech Conference NUI Maynooth 2012

The sense of community is much stronger at my new school. People stay at work later- at the old school everyone left early. And at the old

school we weren’t given any work space in the English department so we had to work in the staff room but at the new one we have desks so

we really feel connected to the department. And its great because everyone works at their desks and then for lunch they have ‘turn-in’

time when we all move our chairs away from our desks and eat together in a circle.

(PGCE student)

16

Page 17: Oliver & Gourlay Keynote EdTech Conference NUI Maynooth 2012

I could go into like Web of Knowledge, I could put that reference into EndNote, I could then go and look it up through, do a direct link through to [the University’s] holdings, find the article. But if I actually looked that

article up in the [the University’s] holdings, I then can't then pull it the other way. And it’s like hang on a minute, why does it work in one direction and not another, that just seems [unclear]. Then I've got, something I've actually had up on my screen a moment before, I'm

having to type in by hand. I'm like why, why am I doing this? I don't understand the logic behind why the pathways don't work both ways.

(PhD Student)

17

Page 18: Oliver & Gourlay Keynote EdTech Conference NUI Maynooth 2012

Complexity: domains and devices

18

Page 19: Oliver & Gourlay Keynote EdTech Conference NUI Maynooth 2012

Access, difference, convergence

Well, in my bedroom, on my bed, it's mainly my mobile and going through my emails, travel information, whether on Facebook, my mobile too. Then, um, and in the study

room, that would be my laptop and, um, laptop, that would be Blackboard, research, entertainment.

19

Page 20: Oliver & Gourlay Keynote EdTech Conference NUI Maynooth 2012

The only thing I struggle with […], is the issue of like keeping your private life separate from your work life because I think increasingly the two, you're being forced to kind of mush the two together. Because like [Another Institution] used to have its own email server and it would provide you with an email. Now it’s provided by Gmail and it’s like everybody knows that Gmail is the nosiest thing in the world and tracks absolutely everything you do. And […] I'm a little bit uncomfortable with the idea that my work email knows what shopping I do and, you know what I mean? I just find the whole thing is starting to get a little bit scary.

20

Page 21: Oliver & Gourlay Keynote EdTech Conference NUI Maynooth 2012

Journalling case study: Yuki

Japanese, female in her 40s, MA student

For me the most important thing is portability, because I use technologies, ICT, everywhere I go, anywhere I go. For example of course I use some technologies, PCs and laptops and my iPad in the IOE building, and in the IOE building I use PC, I use them in PC room, in library, and for searching some data or journals. In the lecture room I record my, record the lectures and taking memos by that.

21

Page 22: Oliver & Gourlay Keynote EdTech Conference NUI Maynooth 2012

Print literacies

22

Page 23: Oliver & Gourlay Keynote EdTech Conference NUI Maynooth 2012

Digital/digitised texts

23

Page 24: Oliver & Gourlay Keynote EdTech Conference NUI Maynooth 2012

Non-human actors

24

Page 25: Oliver & Gourlay Keynote EdTech Conference NUI Maynooth 2012

Domains

25

Page 26: Oliver & Gourlay Keynote EdTech Conference NUI Maynooth 2012

26

Page 27: Oliver & Gourlay Keynote EdTech Conference NUI Maynooth 2012

27

Page 28: Oliver & Gourlay Keynote EdTech Conference NUI Maynooth 2012

Themes from the journals

• Complex, constantly shifting set of practices• Permeated with digital mediation• Strongly situated / contingent on the material• Distributed across human /nonhuman actors• Texts are restless, constantly crossing apparent

boundaries of human/nonhuman, digital/analogue, here/not here, now/not now.

28

Page 29: Oliver & Gourlay Keynote EdTech Conference NUI Maynooth 2012

Humans, and what they take to be their learning and social process, do not float, distinct, in container-like contexts of education, such a classrooms or community sits, that can be sits, that can be conceptualised and dismissed as simply a wash of material stuff and spaces. The things that assemble these contexts, and incidentally the actions and bodies including human ones that are part of these assemblages, are continuously acting upon each other to bring forth and distribute, as well as to obscure and deny, knowledge. (Fenwick et al 2011)

29

Page 30: Oliver & Gourlay Keynote EdTech Conference NUI Maynooth 2012

So, what might this mean for you?

Thinking differently about digital literacies• Calling things “generic” and “transferable” just hides the complexity• “Skills” understood as achievements that involve resources (physical,

digital) and people in specific places

…leading to new questions:• Can we develop “resilience”: the capacity to cope when parts of these

network change or break?• (Beetham, Exeter) Can we develop learners’ digital literacy repertoires?

30

Page 31: Oliver & Gourlay Keynote EdTech Conference NUI Maynooth 2012

What might you need to think about?

What technologies are students using anyway?• Do these help or hinder study?• Can they learn to use them in this new context?• Can you help them bring together or keep separate different parts of their

lives?

31

Page 32: Oliver & Gourlay Keynote EdTech Conference NUI Maynooth 2012

What technologies are students required to use?• What do they struggle with or get concerned about?• Where and when do they do this? (Do you know?)• Who helps them, inside or outside the institution? (…if anyone…)• What happens when they struggle, or choose not to use them?

How can you help students to help each other?• Can “resilient” coping strategies be described and shared?

32

Page 33: Oliver & Gourlay Keynote EdTech Conference NUI Maynooth 2012

Revisiting the definitions

Digital literacy defines those capabilities which fit an individual for living, learning and working in a digital society. (Beetham, 2010)

Taxonomic definitions or literacies or of attributes are doomed to failure

33

Page 34: Oliver & Gourlay Keynote EdTech Conference NUI Maynooth 2012

Revisiting the definitions

A focus on orientations not skills and capabilities• …agility, adaptability, resilience, tolerance of ambiguity, ability to

interweave institutional/non-institutional technologies, ability to work across a range of physical, temporal, digital and analogue domains

• A situated account implies situated development, not monolithic institutional programmes

If we want to develop digital literacies for life…• Not giving learners something, but helping them to develop an unafraid

stance of constant learning

34

Page 35: Oliver & Gourlay Keynote EdTech Conference NUI Maynooth 2012

35

Questions and comments?

http://diglitpga.jiscinvolve.org/

Institute of EducationUniversity of London20 Bedford WayLondon WC1H 0AL

Tel +44 (0)20 7612 6000Fax +44 (0)20 7612 6126Email [email protected] www.ioe.ac.uk


Top Related