Invited keynote presentation, "Losing Momentum? Current challenges in Learning and Technology", 2012, Oxford. http://www.losingmomentum.org/

1. Momentum or freefall?
Digital literacies and the
dangerous metaphor of
progress
Martin Oliver
London Knowledge Lab
Institute of Education, University of London
m.oliver@ioe.ac.uk
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2. • Metaphors and orientations
• Issues and theories
• Digital literacy and notions of progress
• Data
• Project “Impact”, and other ways of talking
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3. • Momentum: the impetus gained by a
moving object
– A linear model
– Connotations of smooth forward motion,
unidirectional progress
• An enlightenment, modernist metaphor
• What’s the direction of travel? (…down?!)
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4. The trouble with words…
"You'd better be prepared for the
jump into hyperspace. It's
unpleasantly like being drunk."
"What's so unpleasant about
being drunk?"
"You ask a glass of water.”
– Douglas Adams, The
Hitchhiker’ s Guide to the
Galaxy 4
© www.freedigitalphotos.net

5. …is it unpleasantly like having “impact”?
"And wow! Hey! What's this thing suddenly coming towards
me very fast? Very very fast. So big and flat and round, it
needs a big wide sounding name like ... ow ... ound ...
round ... ground! That's it! That's a good name --- ground!
I wonder if it will be friends with me?
And the rest, after a sudden wet thud, was silence.”
– Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’ s Guide to the
Galaxy
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6. Technology and progress
• Hard technological determinism
– Boosters & utopianism
– Doomsters & dystopianism
• Change is an inevitable consequence of
technology
(…even if we quibble about whether or not
it’s desirable)
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7. Education is on the brink of being
transformed through education; however, it
has been on that brink for some decades
now.
- Laurillard, 2008
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8. Technology and progress
• There are alternatives to simple linear
narratives…
– Soft technological determinism (technology an
influence rather than a determination)
– Socially deterministic accounts
– Non-deterministic accounts
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9. Bringing agency back to technology
• Feenberg (e.g. 2010)
– Design is socially relative: it incorporates
social terms of reference
– Where design prefers particular groups, social
injustice arises
– Dominant technical codes, and the over-
determination of action: managerial control
– ‘Room for maneuver’ as necessary and
desirable in designs
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10. Over-determination
• Technology “offers” (causes) or constrains
– A way of designing user agency out
– Appealing to designers who want users to
behave
– Cf. Woolgar & Grint (1997) and “configuring
the users” (an STS take on the problem)
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11. • Affordances tend to collapse into unhelpful
extremes
– Either a determining, governing set of forces
controlling human action
– Or an unconstrained space in which human
agency can operate unimpeded
• But literacy studies often ‘under-determined’
– Skills and capabilities as ‘free floating’;
unimpeded agency
– Critique of cognitive, individual model
– Focus on meaning-making and texts
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12. Removing the agency of texts and tools in
formalising movements risks romanticising
the practices as well as the humans in them;
focusing uniquely on the texts and tools
lapses into naï ve formalism or techno-
centrism.
– Leander and Lovvorn (2006:301), quoted in
Fenwick et al (p104)
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13. Grappling with inconsistent theories
• JISC funded project: “Digital literacies as a
postgraduate attribute”
– http://diglitpga.jiscinvolve.org/
• An opportunity to relate different ways of
thinking about technology, learning, practice,
cause, etc.
• If technology were deterministic this would be
a non-issue
– Technology would make us all literate, or we’d all
fail to become literate…
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14. • Project team -
– Jude Fransman, Research Fellow
– Lesley Gourlay, Project Director & Academic
Writing Centre
– Susan McGrath, Students’ Union
– Martin Oliver, Deputy Director & Learning
Technologies Unit
– Gwyneth Price, Libary
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15. Grappling with definitions of digital literacies
“Digital literacy defines those capabilities which fit
an individual for living, learning and working in a
digital society.” (Beetham, 2010)
•Four-tier framework:
– Access
– Skills
– Social practices
– Identity
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16. A “top up” model of digital literacy
• A modernist vision of linear
progress
• Perhaps it’s plausible for
uncontested, entry-level skills
in controlled conditions
• Does it work anywhere else?
© freedigitalphotos.net
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17. Grappling with methodology
• Multimodal journalling
– To generate ethnographically informed data
– Ethnography impractical
• Artefacts – emphasis on experience over
abstraction, sense of fine-grained day-to-
day lived practices
– Reflecting diversity, complexity, etc
– Data as close as possible to practices, not
accounts of practices
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18. Literacies as social practice
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19. Literacies as situated practice
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20. 20

21. 21

22. What do our students use?
• Lots of things - many institutional, but also many that are
not institutionally supported
– Office tools (primarily Microsoft, plus Google docs and Prezi)
– Institutional VLEs (Moodle and Blackboard)
– Email (institutional, personal and work-based)
– Synchronous conferencing services (Skype, Elluminate)
– Calendars (iCal, Google)
– Search engines and databases (including Google, Google Scholar,
library databases, professional databases such as Medline, etc),
– Social networking sites (Facebook, Academia.edu, LinkedIn) and
services (Twitter)
– Image editing software (photoshop, lightbox)
– Endnote
– Reference works (Wikipedia, online dictionaries and social bookmarking
sites such as Mendeley)
– GPS services
– Devices (PCs at the institution and at home, laptops including
MacBooks, iPhones, iPads, Blackberries and E-book readers).
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23. “The student experience”
• No evidence that the student experience is
singular
– Marked differences in experiences and priorities across the four
groups
– PGCE, MA students, PhD students, Online masters’
students
– Coping with whiteboards and staff room politics of
access; using the VLE to access materials; library
databases; using the VLE to create a sense of
community (…and Skype behind the scenes…)
– Professional, personal, study
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24. Complexity: domains and devices
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25. The only thing I struggle with […], is the issue of like
keeping your private life separate from your work life
because I think increasingly the two, you're being
forced to kind of mush the two together. Because like
[Another Institution] used to have its own email server
and it would provide you with an email. Now it’s
provided by Gmail and it’s like everybody knows that
Gmail is the nosiest thing in the world and tracks
absolutely everything you do. And […] I'm a little bit
uncomfortable with the idea that my work email knows
what shopping I do and, you know what I mean? I just
find the whole thing is starting to get a little bit scary.
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26. Yuki
Japanese, female in her 40s, MA student
For me the most important thing is portability, because I use
technologies, ICT, everywhere I go, anywhere I go. For
example of course I use some technologies, PCs and
laptops and my iPad in the IOE building, and in the IOE
building I use PC, I use them in PC room, in library, and for
searching some data or journals. In the lecture room I record
my, record the lectures and taking memos by that.
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27. Digital/digitised texts, and boundary crossing
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28. Domains
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29. 29

30. Themes from the journals
• Complex, constantly shifting set of practices
• Permeated with digital mediation
• Strongly situated / contingent on the material
• Distributed across human /nonhuman actors
• Texts are restless, constantly crossing apparent
boundaries of human/nonhuman,
digital/analogue, here/not here, now/not now
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31. Grappling with consequences
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32. A stand against progressive definitions
• A focus on orientations, not skills and
capabilities
– A situated account implies situated development, not
monolithic institutional programmes
– …agility, adaptability, resilience, tolerance of
ambiguity, ability to interweave institutional/non-
institutional technologies, ability to work across a
range of physical, temporal, digital and analogue
domains
– A challenge to the general direction of the programme
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33. A stand against local policies
• A reaction against an over-determined IT
strategy
– From interview to transcript
– From transcript to report
– From report to working group
– From report to recommendation document
– From document to committee
– From committee to constitution of a User
Group, creation of room for maneuver
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34. A link to wider debates and theorisation
Humans, and what they take to be their learning and social
process, do not float, distinct, in container-like contexts of
education, such a classrooms or community sits, that can be
sits, that can be conceptualised and dismissed as simply a
wash of material stuff and spaces. The things that assemble
these contexts, and incidentally the actions and bodies
including human ones that are part of these assemblages,
are continuously acting upon each other to bring forth and
distribute, as well as to obscure and deny, knowledge.
(Fenwick et al 2011)
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35. Revisiting today’s theme…
Have these promises led where expected?
During this day we will explore more
nuanced realities about new technologies
and learning current in various settings and
contexts.
(Event poster)
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36. Some conclusions
• A non-linear account
– “Un-defining digital literacies” (Lesley
Gourlay)
– A tolerance of mess, ambiguity and specificity
– An account that unravels in very different
directions
– Unhelpful to “top up” accounts
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37. Some different metaphors
• Not about sustaining momentum
– A rush to where, exactly? (Unchecked freefall?)
– Progress towards whose ends, and on whose
terms?
• Not all that much about impact
– Less about the “effect” technology has had
– More about collisions between technologies
and practices, and about rebounding and
coping
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38. Some different metaphors
• Potential energy, not kinetic energy?
– The project holding back momentum (so
things are visible, study-able; and to make
decisions more deliberate)
– Building capacity to endure, cope and work
around
– Entangling, not progressing
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39. Some different metaphors
• ‘Black boxing’
– Not a tale of simplicity and sophistication, but
of decisions about which choices to force on
people, and which to deny them
(How was it ever plausible to assume one
pattern would work for everyone…?)
• Shoring up
– Not a model of progress, but an account of
how people rebuild and repair as edifices
crumble
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40. Questions and comments?
http://diglitpga.jiscinvolve.org/
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