Lucila Carvalho is a senior lecturer in e-learning and digital technologies at Massey University, New Zealand. Lucila's research explores how culture and social structures shape the design and use of technology, and how technology influences cultural and social experiences. Lucila's research interests are in the areas of design, technology and learning in formal and non-formal settings. Pippa Yeoman is a contract researcher and sessional lecturer at The University of Sydney, Australia. Pippa's research explores sociotechnical innovations in learning, to date she has conducted more than 1,000 hours of observational research in both school and university settings. Education, broadly speaking, includes formal and informal learning activity, as well as life-long and life-wide learning. Contemporary pedagogical practices tend to emphasize student-centred, project-based and/or inquiry-based forms of learning. This activity often alternates between periods of individual and group work, and learners are expected to gradually take greater control of, and responsibility for, their learning (Beetham & Sharpe, 2013). In the developed world, these practices tend to go hand-in-hand with networked technologies (eg, smartphones and laptops) that give learners' access to a wide variety of online resources. There is no doubt that educational technologies are reshaping and extending traditional spaces for learning in schools, universities, museums and many other spaces. What is in question, is our ability to theorize and critically analyse their effects on communities of learning, across time and space; from the micro-actions
AbstractDesigning for digitally enhanced learning has increased in complexity. In response, this paper calls for a reconceptualization of technology-as the reconfiguring of space, place, materials, time and social relations-enrolled and refashioned in emergent learning activity. Such reconceptualization requires analytical tools, methods and processes to map heterogeneous assemblages of people, tools and tasks. Educational researchers and designers are in need of approaches and theories that move beyond deterministic accounts about the utility of individual learning technologies, to connect theory, research and practice. Our research shows that in learning to distinguish between elements that are open to alteration through design and those that are not, educational designers gain deeper insights into the flows of matter, information and humans characteristic of productive networked learning environments. And this, in turn, gives rise to valued qualities of emergent learning activity in alignment with current theories about learning. In this paper, we present a series of methods adapted from archaeology and design, illustrating their power in tracing the complex webs of dependence characteristic of productive learning entanglement, with the aim of supporting future design for learning.
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