Seminar at Leicester University, 11th June, 2013

1. Rethinking digital
literacies: a
sociomaterial analysis of
students use of
technology
Martin Oliver & Lesley Gourlay
Institute of Education, University of London
m.oliver@ioe.ac.uk
http://www.slideshare.net/MartinOliver

2. Digital literacies
Sociomateriality
The project
Overview
Methodology
Themes
Conclusions

3. Digital Literacies

4. Considering these points, the DigEuLit project has
developed the following definition of digital literacy:
Digital Literacy is the awareness, attitude and ability
of individuals to appropriately use digital tools and
facilities to identify, access, manage, integrate,
evaluate, analyse and synthesize digital resources,
construct new knowledge, create media expressions,
and communicate with others, in the context of
specific life situations, in order to enable constructive
social action; and to reflect upon this process.
(Digital competence; digital usage; digital transformation)
(Martin & Grudziecki, 2006)

5. Belshaw‟s Eight Elements of Digital Literacies
Cultural
Cognitive
Constructive
Communicative
Confident
Creative
Critical
Civic

6. “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

7. Elements
Capabilities
Skills
Attributes
Ideology of graduate as a quality-assured
product?

8. Moving on from
taxonomies…
Drawing upon the frameworks outlined above, we
propose as a definition of digital literacies:
the constantly changing practices through which
people make traceable meanings using digital
technologies.
Within this broad definition, specific aspects of digital
literacies can be investigated and explored further,
understood as in many ways offering a continuity to
our understandings of literacies in general as social
practice.
(Gillen & Barton, 2010)

9. …towards
digital
academic
practice
• Academic practices are
overwhelming textual
• These are situated in
social and disciplinary
contexts
• Textual practices are
increasingly digitally
mediated
• These practices take place
across a range of domains
• Students create complex
assemblages enrolling a
range of digital, material,
spatial and temporal
resources

10. Sociomateriality

11. „If you can, with a straight face, maintain that
hitting a nail with and without a hammer, boiling
water with and without a kettle...are exactly the
same activities, that the introduction of these
mundane implements change 'nothing important'
to the realisation of tasks, then you are ready to
transmigrate to the Far Land of the Social and
disappear from this lowly one.‟
(Latour 2005: 71)

12. 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)

13. Universities and textual
practices
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 naïve
formalism or techno-centrism.
Leander and Lovvorn (2006:301), quoted in Fenwick
et al (p104)

14. Reflexive relationship between textual media and
knowledge practices in higher education (Kittler
2004)
Need to explore ramifications of devices & digitally
mediated semiotic practices on meaning making

15. The research

16. Digital Literacies as a
Postgraduate Attribute?
JISC Developing Digital Literacies
Programme
http://diglitpga.jiscinvolve.org/
Institute of Education, University of
London
iGraduate survey / Focus groups /
multimodal journalling in year 1
Case studies across four areas in
year 2:
Academic Writing Centre
Learning Technologies Unit
Library

17. Survey

18. Focus groups

19. PGCE, MA students, PhD students, Online masters‟
students
Mapping exercise, leading to discussion of what,
where and when of studying
Difficulties recruiting PGCE students due to
logistics of school placements
Pros and cons of videoing focus groups

20. The only thing I struggle with, like I just mentioned it
earlier before, 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 [college] 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.
(PhD student focus group)

21. “The student experience”
No evidence that the student experience is
singular
Marked differences in experiences and priorities
across the four groups
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

22. Neither all „institutional‟, nor personal
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).

23. A taxonomic list would be problematic
Time specific (and rapidly dated)
Unfeasibly long
Containing much that‟s irrelevant for individuals
Digital literacy as a kind of coping
Personal and situated, not monolithic and
general

24. Journaling
12 students recruited from the focus groups
3 from each of the four groups (distance students via
Skype)
A structured programme of interviews
A digital „biography‟, exploration of current practice,
guidance on data generation
Students capture images, video and other forms of
documentation to explore engagement with
technologies for study
2-3 further interviews, building student analysis of data
via presentations

25. Identification of orientations towards technology
use
Curation, combat and coping
Examples from this to follow
Rich body of data
Images, videos and presentation a powerful
stimulus for discussion
“Interview plus” (e.g. Mayes, 2006)
What can we do with these data in their own
right?
(e.g. Pink, 2012; Rose, 2007)

26. Themes

27. Orientations

28. Yuki: „curation‟

29. For example when I attend a lecture or a session I
always record the session, and it‟s after the session,
but sometimes I listen to the lecture again to confirm
my knowledge or reflect the session...when I, for
example we‟re writing an essay and I have
to...confirm what the lecturer said, I could confirm
with the recording data. (Yuki Interview 1)

30. Sally:
„combat‟

31. I was like bullied into it by people saying, oh, you‟ll be left
behind if you don‟t use Facebook. So yes, that was
when I got into it, so... And then... so now I would say
Facebook, I‟m not the most... like I said to you in the
focus group, I‟m a bit uncomfortable about the whole kind
of like Big Brother aspect. (Sally Interview 1)
I feel like, also that Google is equally watching you. You
know, they‟re all watching you, they‟re all trying to sell
you things, and the thing is not, I don‟t so much mind
being bombarded with advertising as I mind having things
put about me on things like Facebook that I don‟t want.
You know, I don‟t want my friends to spy on me, I don‟t
want my friends to know what I listen to on YouTube.
(Sally Interview 1)

32. Faith: „coping‟

33. In my school, I… we had… our staff room was
equipped… one, two, three, four, five, six, seven… seven
computers now we can use and only one of them
attached with a printer. So, actually we‟ve got six PGC
students over there, so it‟s, kind of, everybody wants to
get to that computer where you can use the printer. Yes,
so in the end I found actually I can also use the printer
from the library in the school.
So, six student teachers tried to use other computer. So,
it, kind of, sometimes feels a bit crowded. And when the
school staff want to use it, well, okay, it seems like we are
the invaders, intruders?

34. Spaces

35. 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.

36. 36

39. Interlude
Trying mapping out where you undertake your
work
Are spaces associated with particular times or
patterns?
Which spaces do you feel in control of? Where do
you feel supported?
Are there spaces where you avoid undertaking
certain kinds of work? Why?

40. Identity

41. Managing the separation and integration of
personal, professional and study places
Email accounts
Social network profiles
etc

42. One of the challenges of undertaking an online
course is that most probably you will do this
alongside „other‟ activities such as a job or other. As
a result you end up with multiple email addresses
and different folders, files and docs in your
computer. I am finding that one needs to be very
organised and a practical thinker in order to: retrieve
the information you need, navigate between one and
in the other. (Lara email)

43. Texts

44. Yuki‟s books
From print to digital and back
again

45. “The bathroom is a good place to
read”
Digitally connected texts in a very embodied
setting – neither „virtual‟ nor „real‟ (Jurgenson 2012)

46. Conclusions

47. Substantive conclusions
Undermines taxonomic conceptions of digital
literacies
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

48. Reflections on the process
Tensions between generation of a rich data set and
manageability of data collection and analysis
Later versions of NVivo can embed non-textual media
Helps with the integration of multimodal data
Raises question about the status of images – ethnographic links
to practice, illustrations, an object of analysis in their own
right…?
Extent to which multimodal journaling should be structured
and guided
Cross sectional vs case study analysis of the data set
One group of twelve?
Four groups of three?
Twelve individuals?

49. Project blog:
http://diglitpga.jiscinvolve.org/wp/
Project webpage:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elea
rning/developingdigitalliteracies/DigLitPGAttribut
e.aspx
Project contacts:
Lesley Gourlay (l.gourlay@ioe.ac.uk)
Martin Oliver (m.oliver@ioe.ac.uk)

50. References
Belshaw, D. (2011) What is „digital literacy‟? A pragmatic investigation. Doctoral Thesis, Durham University.
Available online: http://neverendingthesis.com/doug-belshaw-edd-thesis-final.pdf
Fenwick, T., Edwards,R. & Sawchuk, P. (2011) Emerging Approaches to Educational Research: Tracing the
Sociomaterial. London: Routledge.
Gillen, J. & Barton, D. (2010) Digital Literacies: a research briefing by the Technology Enhanced Learning
phase of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme. London: London Knowledge Lab. Available
online: http://www.tlrp.org/docs/DigitalLiteracies.pdf
Jurgenson, N. (2012) When atoms meet bits: Social Media, the Mobile Web and Augmented Revolution.
Future Internet, 4, 83-91.
Kittler, F. (2004). Universities: wet, hard, soft, and harder. Critical Enquiry 31(1): 244-255.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Martin, A., & Grudziecki, J. (2006). DigEuLit: Concepts and Tools for Digital Literacy Development.
Innovation in Teaching And Learning in Information and Computer Sciences, 5 (4), 249 -267.
Mayes, T. (2006) The Learner Experience of e-Learning: Methodology Report. Available online:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/elearningpedagogy/lex_method_final.pdf
Pink, S. (2012) Advances in Visual Methodology. London: Sage.
Rose, G. (2007) Visual methodologies: an introduction to the interpretation of visual materials. London:
Sage.