Search

An editorial is presented on research in learning, media, and technology. Topics include use of computers in schools maintaining and exaggerating inequities, with poor, minority, and female students having less access; and revolutionising open and distance learning being developed in feminist, radical, and anti-racist classrooms.

The inequities rooted in our education systems and wider societies have been thrown into relief by responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper presents four situational studies of the FemEdTech network, asking how we characterise activities of the network, what they tell us about the nature of diffuse, convivial networks, and what opportunities they provide for challenging inequities in the field of technology and/in education. The study draws on practices and materials produced through FemEdTech activities from 2017 to 2020. Data and its analysis are presented as a spiral of 'turns' which fold back on each other to create connections between lines of research, moving fluidly between the objective and subjective. The four studies present shared curation, collaborative writing and purposeful reflection as contested fields of action. On one hand they build solidarity and shared resources – 'holding up' the flow of knowledge in networks, potentially redistributing the capital of attention and connectivity. At the same time, they underscore the costs of shared work which are different in open networks from those that operate in the reified, accelerated production cycles of academic roles – yet connected with them, not least because they always involve investments of care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on actor-network theory and on the sociology of cultural consumption to examine the phenomenon of corporate Massive Open Online Courses. Through an analysis of texts available in the public domain, the paper argues that over a short period (between 2012 and 2013) digitisation technology became associated with the emergence of a hybrid ‘actor’: the digital video-recorder teacher. A parallel is drawn between the ‘interactive affordances’ of digital instruction and the playback and cataloguing options that have contributed to shifts in television viewing habits. The digital video-recorder teacher is described as an artefact in the service of a postmodern project of self-improvement through cultural consumption, which recruits digitisation to meet a growing demand for ‘upgrades to the self’. In the conclusion, the paper explores how the study of digital education could benefit from an interface between sociomaterial studies and the sociology of culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]