Investigating digital doings through breakdowns: a sociomaterial ethnography of a Bring Your Own Device school

Alirezabeigi, Samira; Masschelein, Jan; Decuypère, Mathias

doi:10.1080/17439884.2020.1727501

Cited by 49 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 29 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Articles in Learning Media and Technology in recent years, in pre-pandemic times, have explored what happens when technological devices are brought from home into school, critiquing the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement, and exploring the ways in which they alter relations in classroom space-time (e.g., Alirezabeigi, Masschelein, and Decuypere 2020). The lockdown in many countries occasioned by the pandemic requires us to hold the mirror up to what happens when classroom space-time travels in the other direction, into the home environment, introducing the polysynchronous world of learning in the digital age into the rhythms of family life.…”

Section: Spaces and Hierarchies In Pandemic Times: Re-locating Digital Pedagogymentioning

confidence: 99%

Pandemic politics, pedagogies and practices: digital technologies and distance education during the coronavirus emergency

Williamson

Eynon

Potter

2020

Learning, Media and Technology

709

377

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The first special issue of Learning, Media and Technology of 2020, entitled 'Education and technology into the 2020s: speculative futures', presented a series of papers looking to the future of critical research on educational technologies. As we write, just a few months later, with the coronavirus pandemic sweeping around the world, the future appears more uncertain than ever. Global infection and illness, population lockdowns, and mass closures of educational institutions have engulfed countries across the planet in the short time between issues of this journal.The global pandemic is of course not only a serious public health emergency, but a political, economic and social emergency too. Scholarship across myriad disciplines in years to come will examine the medical, political, economic and social factors defining our present moment. Many of these issues will be of interest to readers of Learning, Media and Technology. They include political manoeuvring in relation to the pandemic, from misinformation and economic measures to policies of social distancing, quarantining and isolation; the use and misuse of large-scale data, statistics and visualizations; new forms of digitally mediated work, culture and personal life; surveillance systems for 'contact tracing'; the use of predictive epidemiological modelling; the development of techniques for better public understanding of science; and the political use of behavioural economics as a public pedagogy of population management. Future papers in this journal will be written in the context of changes currently being experienced at planetary scale, and potentially dramatic shifts in the relationships between science, technology and society.In one key area we feel Learning, Media and Technology can and should make a more direct contribution to knowledge and practice during the COVID-19 pandemic: the switch to online and digital education formats and the rise of 'remote' forms of teaching and learning as a consequence of mass closures of schools, colleges and universities. In this moment of pandemic politics, where contests are being fought at multiple scales and levels over the ways to handle and resolve the crisis, distance education has become a widespread matter of concern for political authorities, education businesses, charities, teachers, parents and students alike. Education has become an emergency matter, and along with it, educational technologies have been positioned as a frontline emergency service. In recent years Learning, Media and Technology has become a key publication for critical studies of education and technology. Other outlets have responded to the rapid switch to online education with useful guidance, advice, and references to extant research from promising studies that might support educators to make the best of this new educational emergency. But the need remains for critical reflection on the planetary pivot to digitally mediated remote and distance education.We have no wish to denigrate or criticize online distance education, but rather, the ai...

show abstract

Section: Spaces and Hierarchies In Pandemic Times: Re-locating Digital Pedagogymentioning

confidence: 99%

Pandemic politics, pedagogies and practices: digital technologies and distance education during the coronavirus emergency

Williamson

Eynon

Potter

2020

Learning, Media and Technology

709

377

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…For instance, and depending on the specific study at hand, such analysis can require a straightforward ad-hoc interviewing of users, but very often requires some sort of additional, more profound engagement (see Seaver, 2017 for the full scope of this argument). As is well known, such engagement is regularly achieved by means of ethnographic methods, which can be adapted to fit the elusive and heterogeneous nature of educational data infrastructures (Alirezabeigi, Masschelein, & Decuypere, 2020). Crucially, the analytical gaze is in this respect not so much on immersion -as is customary in more traditional ethnographic studies.…”

Section: User (With)mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Topologies of Data Practices: A Methodological Introduction

Decuypère

2021

J. New Approaches Educ. Res.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper offers a methodological framework to research data practices in education critically. Data practices are understood in the generic sense of the word here, i.e., as the actions, performances, and the resulting consequences, of introducing data-producing technologies in everyday educational situations. The paper first distinguishes between data infrastructures, datafication and data points as three distinct, yet interrelated, phenomena. In order to investigate their concrete doings and specificities, the paper proposes a topological methodology that allows disentangling the relational nature and interwovenness of data practices. Based on this methodology, the paper proceeds with outlining a methodical toolbox that can be employed in studying data practices. Starting from nascent work on digital education platforms as a worked example, the toolbox allows researchers to investigate data practices as consisting of four unique topological dimensions: the Interface of a data practice, its actual Usage, its concrete Design, and its Ecological embeddedness - IUDE.

show abstract

“…It is precisely when practices break down in an emergency such as a pandemic that the agential capacity of such actors and assemblages is rendered very clearly visible (cf. Alirezabeigi et al, 2020). Using different terms and phrasings, many prominent thinkers such as Durkheim (1938Durkheim ( /1977, Marx (1977), Foucault (1977) and Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) have also pointed to such obligatory features and characteristics, describing examinations as sacred rituals within educational systems.…”

Section: Examinations: Obligatory Points Of Passage Sacred Rituals and Choreographiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dancing with Covid: Choreographing examinations in pandemic times

López

Decuypère

Dey

et al. 2021

European Educational Research Journal

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this paper, we explore the improvisations made in examination practices in higher education during the pandemic of 2020. Drawing on STS, we start from the theoretical assumption that examinations constitute an obligatory passage point in universities and colleges: a sacred point which students need to pass if they want to gain recognized qualifications. We base our analysis of higher education examinations on cases from six countries around the world: Australia, Belgium, Chile, India, Sweden and the UK. We use the analytical heuristic of choreography to follow the movements, tensions and resistance of the ‘emergency examinations’ as well as the re-orderings of actors and stages that have inevitably occurred. In our analytical stories we see the interplay between the maintenance of fixed and sacred aspects of examinations and the fluidity of improvisations aimed at meeting threats of spreading Covid-19. These measures have forced the complex network of examinations both to reinforce some conventional actors and to assemble new actors and stages, thus creating radically new choreographies. Although higher education teaching and didactics are being framed as a playground for pedagogical innovation with digital technologies, it is clear from our data that not all educational activities can be so easily replicated.

show abstract

Investigating digital doings through breakdowns: a sociomaterial ethnography of a Bring Your Own Device school

Cited by 49 publications

References 29 publications

Pandemic politics, pedagogies and practices: digital technologies and distance education during the coronavirus emergency

Pandemic politics, pedagogies and practices: digital technologies and distance education during the coronavirus emergency

The Topologies of Data Practices: A Methodological Introduction

Dancing with Covid: Choreographing examinations in pandemic times

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About