The agencement of taskification: On new forms of reading and writing in BYOD schools

Abstract

The proliferation of digital devices in educational settings has contributed to the decentralization of knowledge from teachers and established textbooks to fluid online personalized resources, and from blackboards as spaces of materialization of this knowledge to personal screens. In this new constellation, school practices such as reading, writing and note-taking take new forms. How are these practices reconfigured when centered around mobile digital devices? In this paper, we investigate routine lesson practices of a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) school by means of an ethnographic observation. Adopting the term agencement as a heuristic device, we explore what practices are being constituted and how they are always in connection with one another. Moreover, we show that by practicing they produce different forms of action. We argue that in such a hybrid constellation, tasks find a different status beyond isolated and self-contained units for enhancing learning in different lessons. We introduce task-agencement, through which the task always entails a process of taskification that formats BYOD schools. With taskification, we mean that the task-agencement expands the domain in which tasks not only influence the organization and structure of lessons, but equally the very organization of the BYOD school by enacting a particular form of schooling. Finally, we propose a taskified form as a form of BYOD schooling that templates and formats how practices such as reading and writing, contextualization and introduction of the lesson are conducted.