Capturing the sociomateriality of digital literacy events

Abstract

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.

To Boldly Go: Feedback as Digital, Multimodal Dialogue

“…Any attempt to evaluate the value of multimodal feedback needs to take account of the wider entanglement of human, material, technological, and political interests and opportunities that contribute towards educational practice [12,[14][15][16]. In their research around student perceptions towards digitally recorded multimodal feedback, Philips et al [46] call for greater attention to the influence of secondary factors including preferred learning style, access to technology, institutional assessment policies, and so on.…”

“…I reject, however, the instrumentalist tendency to regard digital resources as tools to deliver learning [12], or an essentialist position whereby technology is seen to be the dominant driver of pedagogic change [13]. Drawing on conceptual work around sociomateriality in education [14][15][16], I take the position that feedback is performed through an assemblage of technological, human, institutional, and other material interests and opportunities. The value of a sociomaterial approach to education research, according to Fenwick et al [14], is through the way that it draws attention to the broader range of human and non-human interests, resources, and opportunities that shape what takes place in and beyond the classroom.…”

Diving deep into digital literacy: emerging methods for research

“…These reflections, we argue, support the developing scholarly conversation surrounding the problem of new methods in new literacies research (Asselin and Moayeri 2010;Caperton 2010), Literacy Studies (Bhatt and de Roock 2013;Albers, Holbrook, and Flint 2014), as well as methodological innovations in the social sciences more generally (Snee et al, forthcoming).…”

Board # 33 : Work in Progress: Toward an Understanding of Strategies Used in Open-ended Programming Tasks

“…Our analysis method followed that used by Bhatt and Roock in their study of digital literacy events. 9 Our environment differed though, in an important regard. While their study was situated in the context of the classroom, and thus data were collected in that environment, we conducted our study in a research lab.…”

“…We chose the perspective of sociomateriality which has been used in organizational studies, 8 research of digital literacy in learning environments, 9 and increasingly in engineering education research. 10,11 Said simply, sociomateriality is the idea that humans and the material world can not be analyzed as disjoint entities.…”