This document discusses a study that critiques the digital dualism perspective on student entanglements with technologies. Through focus groups and longitudinal journaling with students, the study found students' meaning making practices are saturated with digital mediation through devices in hybrid online/offline spaces. This challenges notions of a separation between the material and virtual or user and device. The implications are the need for sociomaterial perspectives and theoretical development to account for posthuman semiotic practices and hybrid subjectivities in higher education.

1. critiquing digital
dualism: a
sociomaterial account
of student
entanglements with
technologies
Lesley Gourlay & Martin Oliver
Institute of Education
@lesleygourlay #TtW13 #d2

2. overview
digital mediation and textual practices
problems with dualism
multimodal journalling findings

3. ‘the university’ is
enacted through day-
to-day
entanglements
clustered around
texts

4. texts and semiotic
practices are elided in
contemporary accounts
of the university,
rendered transparent,
‘innocent’ repositories,
stripped of situatedness,
materiality and
embodiment

5. textual practices in the
university are saturated
with digital mediation,
entanglements with
devices, and hybrid
domains

6. Material campus saturated with digital mediation
Status of ‘face-to-face’ placed in radical doubt
(Gourlay 2012)
Posthuman (Hayles 1999) nature of meaning-
making practices

7. 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

8. sociomaterial
perspectives
Actor Network Theory (e.g. Latour 2005)
Sociomateriality (e.g. Fenwick et al 2011).

9. ‘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)

10. the study
2-year UK government-funded
project
http://diglitpga.jiscinvolve.org/
1st year: student research
Focus groups
Longitudinal multimodal
journalling
2nd year: implementation
projects
Staff longitudinal journalling
Changes to structures and
systems

11. Spaces,
places and
times
• Making, not just finding,
places for study
‘Digital literacies’ as coping
strategy
• Managing the separation
and integration of
personal, professional and
study places
Email accounts
Printers in schools
Social networks etc

12. Too close for comfort
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 name] 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.

13. A library transformed
Materiality, ephemerality, digitisation, inscription,
mobility
‘Curation’ of multimodal texts
… 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)

14. Yuki’s books
From print to digital and back
again

15. “The bathroom is a good place to
read”
Too close for comfort, or close enough to be
comfortable?
Digitally connected texts in a very embodied
setting – neither ‘virtual’ nor ‘real’ (Jurgenson 2012)

16. implications
Undermines ‘common
sense’ binaries of
user/device and
material/virtual
Destabilises notions of
single, stable, human
authorship and agency
Need for theoretical
development to account
for posthuman semiotic
practices and
subjectivities in
education

17. Fenwick, T., Edwards, R. & Sawchuck, P. (2011). Emerging Approaches of
Educational Research: Tracing the Sociomaterial. London: Routledge.
Gourlay, L. (2012) 'Cyborg ontologies and the lecturer's voice: a
posthuman reading of the 'face-to-face', Learning, Media and Technology
37 (2), 198-211.
Hayles, N. (1999). How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. London: University of Chicago
Press.
JISC (2012) Digital Literacies as a Postgraduate Attribute?
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/developingdigitallit
eracies/DigLitPGAttribute.aspx [Accessed 30 June 2012]
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.