The production of ‘proper cheating’ in online examinations within technological universities

This paper uses poststructuralist theories of governmentality, agency, consumption and Barry’s (2001) concept of Technological Societies, as a heuristic framework to trace the role of online education technologies in the instantiation of subjectification processes within contemporary Australian universities. This case study of the unintended effects of the adoption and usage of an online educational technology (WebFreedom) for online examinations in an Australian university setting is analysed using poststructuralist theories of governmentality, agency and consumption. The analysis demonstrates how techniques of governing the learning practices of students via online educational technologies intersect with the agentive capacity of students who are relocated as consumers in the higher education marketplace. In particular the paper focuses on the production of unintended localized online examination behaviours resulting in a form of ‘subterranean ethics’ or cheating in online exams. The results from this case study raise critical questions concerning the ways in which both students and tertiary educators are constituted within neoliberal governmental thought, as well as the ways in which students produce themselves in practice as autonomous agents and educational consumers within tertiary education. Suggestions on the focus of future research in the area are discussed.     

Lifelong learning ecologies in online higher education: Students' engagement in the continuum between formal and informal learning

Lifelong learning opportunities are readily accessible through the hybridization of digital learning contexts—from formal to informal—in today's globally networked knowledge society. As such, expanded learning opportunities generate a continuum of learning contexts and experiences mediated through digital technology. Consequently, there is an urgent need to actively examine the interconnections and complex relations between what is learned in formal university scenarios and the everyday learning that happens outside of the classroom, particularly the informal learning that is afforded through expanded and emerging digital contexts. The current research problem illustrates that expanded and emerging professional development scenarios require new pedagogical designs for empowering lifelong learners to harness the affordances of the web across both formal and informal contexts and practices. This study outlines ways in which students shape their learning ecologies in virtual contexts to support formal academic learning in online higher education. The paper presents qualitative results from a larger mixed methods interpretive case study. The multicase and multisite study examines three fully online graduate programmes in Education and Digital Technology during the 2017–18 academic year, collecting data in the form of online programme documentation, student interviews and online participant observation. Purposeful and criterion sampling were used to select 13 participants across three sites in Spain, the UK and the USA. The study was underpinned by a lifelong learning ecologies theoretical perspective to analyse learning processes across a continuum of practices and contexts. Findings illustrate how students conceive of, as well as how they organize their learning ecologies through a unique configuration of activities, digital resources and networked social support, indicating that academic programmes and teachers have an essential role in empowering student learning ecologies across contexts, recognizing past trajectories and supporting the development of valued disciplinary practices and perspectives across a continuum of learning.     

Nagging,noobs and new tricks – students’ perceptions of school as a context for digital technology use

While digital technology is an integral feature of contemporary education, schools are often presumed to constrain and compromise students’ uses of technology. This paper investigates students’ experiences of school as a context for digital technology use. Drawing upon survey data from three Australian secondary schools (n = 1174), this paper considers the various ways in which students use digital devices and applications “in school” and “for school”. After highlighting trends and differences across a range of digital devices and practices, the paper explores the ways in which students perceive school as a limiting and/or enabling setting for technology use. The findings point to a number of ways that schools act to extend as well as curtail student engagement with technology. This paper concludes by considering the possible ways that schools might work to further support and/or enhance students’ technology experiences.     

The Care of Our Hybrid Selves: Towards a Concept of Bildung For Digital Times

This article draws on the work of Michel Foucault to develop a concept of Bildung for our digital times. It first shows how Foucault's concept of disciplinary power challenges the traditional Bildung‐ideal of autonomy. It then goes on to elaborate Foucault's concepts of power, freedom and self‐practices, which can all be extended to the domain of technology use: just as we can never escape from power relations, we cannot purify ourselves from technology, and a clear distinction between humans and technologies is illusory at best. This does not imply an elimination of freedom, however, because, just as with power, freedom does not consist of an absence of external influences, but the practice of coping with these influences. Contemporary Bildung can therefore be characterized as what Steven Dorrestijn calls a care of our hybrid selves, which includes critical skills, like attentional control. Such skills do not stand in opposition to digital technology, however, but in relation to it and must be cultivated through extensive training. Furthermore, while educational initiatives play a vital role in this training process, we must not neglect students’ own technological self‐practices. Exploring such practices allows us to analyse the technology‐related critiques that already exist in everyday practice.     

Southern agency and digital education: an ethnography of open online learning in Dili,Timor-Leste

ABSTRACT

This ethnography, based on fieldwork in Dili, Timor-Leste between 2015 and 2017, adopts an orthodox sociological theorising of agency to investigate the ways in which people in Dili negotiate the numerous interacting structural barriers to digital education. Having identified a lack of attention to learner agency in the literature on the promotion and adoption of MOOCs and OER in the Global South (King, Pegrum, and Forsey [2018]. ‘MOOCs and OER in the Global South: Problems and Potential’. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning 19 (5): 2–20. doi:10.19173/irrodl.v19i5.3742), the paper addresses Connell’s [(2008). Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin] influential criticism of the imbalances in global knowledge production, and explores the parallels in technologically enhanced learning. A new concept- Southern agency- is developed through the stories of three Timorese students and their engagement with digital education, focussing on the influences of local infrastructure, family, literacies and the colonial legacy. The paper highlights the need for more extensive research into local practices of learning with technologies and advocates Southern agency as a heuristic device to gain valuable insights into the lived experience of Southern learners.     

Exploring the boundary between school science and everyday knowledge in primary school pedagogic practices

This paper explores the different ways that primary school teachers in Uganda navigate the boundary between school science and everyday knowledge in the context of a centrally mandated curriculum innovation. The paper is based on a study of the pedagogic practices of 16 teachers in eight Ugandan primary schools that were selected on the basis of having a track record of either high or low academic achievement in the public primary school‐leaving examination. The official primary school curriculum in Uganda prescribes that science be taught in an integrated form, including integration between science subject knowledge and everyday knowledge. The strategies that teachers in the study adopted in relating science to everyday knowledge was a key feature that differentiated between pedagogic practices in the high‐performing and low‐performing schools. In high‐performing schools, teachers recruited everyday knowledge as a resource for learning science as a specialised discourse; whereas in the low‐performing schools, acquiring everyday knowledge was viewed as an end in itself. The paper, then, considers the implications of differences in teachers' pedagogic strategies for the kinds of knowledge to which learners are given access.     

Understanding Digital Literacy Practices: What Can Be Learnt with Visual Methods?

Digital technologies are increasingly used by children and adults in their everyday lives and these practices have attracted researchers’ and practitioners’ attention. However, everyday digital literacy practices are difficult to examine. They require appropriate research methods and visual methods have potential here. Although some visual methods are actively used in the field of Literacy Studies, participant-generated digital photography and photo-elicitation remain under-employed in the research of digital literacy practices. Drawing on a qualitative study, this article argues that these methods allow in-depth insights into digital literacy practices to be gained. They offer comprehensive understanding of practices by illuminating what is involved in practices, how practices happen and why people engage in them in particular ways. However, the use of these methods is also associated with a number of challenges. The article concludes with the discussion of the implications for researchers and teacher-researchers who wish to use visual methods to examine digital literacy practices in different contexts.     

Literacy and capital in immigrant youths' online networks across countries

Communication technologies are playing an increasingly prominent role in facilitating immigrants' social networks across countries and the transnational positioning of immigrant youth in their online language and literacy practices. Drawing from a comparative case study of the digital literacy practices of immigrant youth of Chinese descent, this paper examines the cross-border social relationships that are fostered between the youth and their peers in their natal country through the use of instant messaging and other online media. Using Pierre Bourdieu's capital and field theory, and the concept of social capital, this paper considers how literacy development in transnational contexts constitutes the production of social and cultural capital. It argues that the youths' online literacy practices need to be understood within the particular social fields in which they are situated and how they allow the youth to navigate and take up position within social fields that cross national boundaries.     

Translating policy: governmentality and the reflective teacher

This paper deploys some concepts from the work of Michel Foucault to problematise the mundane and quotidian practices of policy translation as these occur in the everyday of schools. In doing that, we suggest that these practices are complicit in the formation of and constitution of teacher subjects, and their subjection to the morality of policy and of educational reform. These practices are some ways in which teachers work on themselves and others, and make themselves subjects of policy. We conceive of the processes of translation, its practices and techniques as a form of ethics, the constitution of a contemporary and contingent version of professionalism through the arts of self-conduct. In all of this, it is virtually impossible to separate out, as Foucault points out, capability from control. We argue that the development of new capacities, new skills of classroom management, of pedagogy, bring along with it the intensification of a power relation. We are primarily concerned with Foucault’s third face of power, pastoral power or government and how this interweaves and overlap with other forms of power within processes of policy and educational reform.     

Inhibition,Integrity and Etiquette Among Online Learners: The Art of Niceness

Recent research on online learning has explored the dense fabric of social presence giving us a better understanding of the rhythms of the teaching-learning exchange. Quantitative studies, especially, have concluded with calls for deeper, more intensive explorations into what happens in online learning environments (Rourke, Anderson, Garrison, & Archer, Journal of Distance Education, 14 (2), 50-71, 1999 ). In this paper, the results of an interpretive study conducted among mature university learners engaged in online study reveal learners' strong affinity to a code of online etiquette. On the demanding front lines of online learning, these learners valued and constructed ways of "being nice" to their fellow learners, creating tolerable levels of harmony and community within which to complete their studies successfully.     

Urban public space and the construction of social life: a social-pedagogical perspective

This paper addresses the question of what meaning urban public space has in relation to the process of children’s socialisation. It builds on data from qualitative research into the social-pedagogical meaning of three contrasting neighbourhoods in the city of Ghent. In this research, the neighbourhood was studied as a social and spatial context in which particular socialising practices are constantly constructed and reconstructed through the everyday social actions and practices of people, including children, and hence influence the socialisation processes of children. The research shows that different patterns influence the strategies through which children learn to deal with issues like diversity, otherness and unpredictability in different ways, ranging from excluding this diversity from the everyday lifeworld, through enclosing oneself within one’s own social group, to learning through the everyday confrontation with diversity.     

Rethinking diversity in learning science: The logic of everyday sense‐making

There are many ways to understand the gap in science learning and achievement separating low‐income, ethnic minority and linguistic minority children from more economically privileged students. In this article we offer our perspective. First, we discuss in broad strokes how the relationship between everyday and scientific knowledge and ways of knowing has been conceptualized in the field of science education research. We consider two dominant perspectives on this question, one which views the relationship as fundamentally discontinuous and the other which views it as fundamentally continuous. We locate our own work within the latter tradition and propose a framework for understanding the everyday sense‐making practices of students from diverse communities as an intellectual resource in science learning and teaching. Two case studies follow in which we elaborate this point of view through analysis of Haitian American and Latino students' talk and activity as they work to understand metamorphosis and experimentation, respectively. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of this new conceptualization for research on science learning and teaching. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 38: 529–552, 2001     

The computer as a cultural influence in mathematical learning

My starting point in this paper is that there is a cultural gap between the mathematics that children do as part of their everyday experience and the mathematics that they learn at school; my thesis is that the computer has (perhaps uniquely) the potential to bridge this divide. The paper will examine the cultural impact-both actual and potential-of the computer on children's mathematical education; at the ways in which the introduction of the computer does and will changes the ambient space in which children learn mathematics.I begin with a brief discussion of the cultural context of mathematics learning and the relationship between informal, everyday mathematical activity, and formal, school mathematies. This perspective leads to a closer examination of what it means to do mathematics, and on the relationship of a technology to the mathematics embedded within a given culture. I discuss the issue of injecting meaning into mathematical activity, and then examine some ways in which the computer might offer a solution to this central problem. Next, I give some examples of the influence of the computer on the culture of the mathematics classroom. Finally, I suggest some of the outstanding issues of research and curriculum development which remain.This paper is based on substantially the same data as is discussed in an article inCultural Dynamics.     

The Ignorant Supervisor: About common worlds,epistemological modesty and distributed knowledge

Abstract

When postgraduate researchers’ interests lie outside the body(ies) of knowledge with which their supervisors are familiar, different supervisory approaches are called for. In such situations, questions concerning the appropriateness of traditional models arise, which almost invariably involve a budding candidate’s relationship with a knowing-established researcher/supervisor. Supervisory relationships involving creative practice-led research in particular confront significant challenges by new and emerging themes, questions, processes and practices. My lack of disciplinary knowledge regarding two PhD candidates’ projects led me some years ago to question the effects of this lack and to search for effective ways of dealing with it. A subsequent commitment to different modes of candidate/supervisor collaborations was based on three assumptions: One, a supervisor is not, in the first instance, a conveyor or purveyor of knowledge. Two, postgraduate researchers already have substantial and refined pockets of relevant knowledge to draw on. Three, and very importantly, they are able to activate networks of distributed knowledge, often outside of the University. The argument presented in this article draws theoretically on Jacques Rancière and Hannah Arendt’s ideas of pedagogy and public space, as well as notions of cosmopolitics (Cheah & Robbins), mode 2 knowledge (Gibbons et al.) and not-knowing in Art & Design (Jonas). Reflections on my experiences of supervising PhD and Master of Art & Design candidates, together with ideas offered by contributors to a book I have recently edited, will locate moments of choice and the emergence of the unforeseeable, of vigilance towards singular events as much as collective understanding.     

Knowledge building community: Keys for using online forums

Conclusion “The need for learning in a knowledge-based society is more important than ever, including traditional classroom teaching, online learning, and/or blended learning” (Levitch & Milheim, 2003). Accordingly, learning in a technology-supported collaborative knowledge building community is more desirable than ever. Whether in distance or blended learning, online forums can provide either an exclusive discussion or a supplement to in-class discussion. Through thoughtful planning and careful implementation, online forums can be used in “creative ways to help students internalize knowledge and share ideas in enjoyable and exchange environments” (Raleigh, 2000). Successful employment of online forums can foster knowledge building community in which desired student qualities are cultivated.     

Digital Literacies Go to School: A Cross-Case Analysis of the Literacy Practices Used in a Classroom-Based Social Network Site

The authors, working from a new literacies studies perspective, suggest that educators can better teach their students if they develop their own knowledge of the purposes, types, and language conventions students use in their informal out-of-school literacy practices. The purpose of this study was to identify the literacy practices used in a classroom-based social network site and determine how these practices reflect digital literacies. By connecting differences in the literacy practices of three fifth-grade girls to the instructional moves made by classroom teachers, the authors were able to identify and describe how classroom teachers unintentionally marginalized the kinds of digital literacies that are valued in the larger society. Findings point to the importance of creating online identities for establishing relationships in a social networking site and a need for teachers to model ways to shift language use when engaging in different writing contexts.     

“How people read and write and they don't even notice”: everyday lives and literacies on a Midlands council estate

This article presents data from a British Academy‐funded study of the everyday literacy practices of three families living on a predominantly white working‐class council housing estate on the edge of a Midlands city. The study explored, as one participant succinctly put it, “how people read and write and they don't even notice”. This alludes to the ways in which everyday practices may not be recognised as part of a dominant model of literacy. The study considered too the ways in which these literacy practices are part of a wider policy context that also fails to notice the impact of austerity politics on everyday lives. An emphasis on quantitative measures of disadvantage and public discourse which vilifies those facing economic challenge can overshadow the resilience and resourcefulness of individuals and families in making meaning from their experiences. Drawing together consideration of everyday lives and the everyday literacies which are part of them, this article explores the impact of the current policy context on access to both economic and cultural resources, showing how literacy, as part of this context, should be recognised as a powerful means not only of constricting lives but also of constructing them.     

Digital portfolios: fact or fashion?

The value of portfolios as an assessment tool is thoroughly researched and their use in education is well documented (Woodward, 2000 Woodward, H. (2000). Portfolios: narratives for learning. Journal of In‐Service Education, 26(2): 329–347. [Taylor & Francis Online] [Google Scholar]). Research on the introduction of digital portfolios is substantially based on general portfolio research; however, additional specific factors and features need to be considered. One of the inherent dangers with digital portfolios, for example, is that the technological novelty of the product could overshadow the purpose of the portfolio. The danger is that learning to use the technology itself could then subsume the learning opportunities of portfolio construction. While the significance of technology is recognized, a balance must be sought so that the fundamental value of developing a portfolio is maintained. Can digital portfolios add value to existing practices or are they a fashion soon to be forgotten? This paper discusses the first phase of research, being conducted with undergraduate students, to interrogate not only the products created but also the processes used as they develop their digital portfolios for their initial teacher education degree. Students were offered the opportunity to develop a first draft of their final semester portfolio within the supportive environment of an elective subject. This trial has prompted us as educators to further explore the ways students can be supported as they develop digital portfolios.     

Digital doings: curating work–learning practices and ecologies

Workers are faced with wider networks of knowledge generation amplified by the scale, diffusion, and critical mass of digital artefacts and web technologies globally. In this study of mobilities of work–learning practices, I draw on sociomaterial theorizing to explore how the work and everyday learning practices of self-employed workers or micro-small business entrepreneurs are changing through the infusion of web and mobile technologies. Drawing primarily on Ingold's notion of wayfinding, Law's collateral realities, and Knorr-Cetina's work on epistemic objects, I examine data from 23 contingent workers in Rwanda, Kenya, and Canada to explore emergent practices of curating learning ecologies (mixtures of technologies, artefacts, activities, and people). I conclude with implications for educators and workers of the growing sophistication of digital fluencies that matter: the play of innovation, expertise, and criticality in everyday work–learning practices and a more thoughtful reckoning with the implications of human–technology interactions on practices.