The gap in knowledge about how learning theories relate to everyday digital teaching practices in universities inhibits scholarly and practical developments in this area. This article reports on part of a qualitative research project which identified patterns across teaching modes, descriptions and accompanying rationales. It found that learning theories played a minor role in educators' rationales, even though many of their teaching practices could be described as pedagogically 'sound'. Although social constructivist approaches were strongly represented in the data, the most widespread rationales for technology uses were folk pedagogies and pseudo-educational theories. This contradicts much of what scholarship and 'edtech' culture espouses as pedagogically led technology use. Such educational technology orthodoxies hinder the progress of theory use in this area and fail to address the realities of how lecturers use digital technologies. While it may come as no surprise that educators did not articulate their practices referencing learning theories, the dominance of pseudo-theories in this research represents a threat to the criticality of scholarship and practice in this area. This article recommends that critical and scholarly approaches to digital teaching are encouraged, and that folk and pseudo-theories are acknowledged and leveraged in the support and development of digital teaching.
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.
[Book review, no abstract]
Technology can be used to bring people closer together yet can also come between them and push them apart. In an age where discourse around our relationship with technology is becoming more widely discussed as problematic, what are the experiences of educators when they use technology for teaching? This chapter discusses influential conceptions of technology and maps them onto digitally mediated teaching. Tensions are identified within the relationships between educator, technology, and learner, and sociomaterial approaches are presented as a means to navigate these areas. Using a research project to demonstrate how sociomaterialism can work in practice, digital teaching was found to be re-distributed over space and time, resulting in consequences, not all of which were intended. This chapter proposes a more interconnected understanding of how people, technology, and learning are enmeshed and makes recommendations for further work that could be done in this area.
No abstract
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